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FIVE FRONTS 



FIVE FRONTS 

On the Firing-Lines with English- 
French, Austrian, German 
and Russian Troops 



BY 

ROBERT DUNN 

Author of "The Youngest World," etc. 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1915 






Copyright, 1914, 1915 

By NEW YORK EVENING POST CO. 

Copyright, 1915 

BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 



/ "UT""^ 



JUN i 1915 

©GI.A406095 
0*+ t s 



To 
ROBERT EMMET MacALARNEY 



Thanks are due the New York Evening Post for 
permission to reprint most of the following pages. 



CONTENTS 

PART I. WITH THE ENGLISH IN FRANCE. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Retreat from Mons i 

II The Battle of Le-Cateau-Cambrai 14 

III St. Quentin and the Aftermath 26 

IV The Turning Tide — Battle of the Marne ... 44 
V Comedy at the British Headquarters 57 

PART II. WITH THE AUSTRIANS IN GALICIA. 

I Into the Carpathians 69 

II The Cholera Trail to Przemysl 82 

III From the Fortress into Battle 94 

IV Dead Radvmno 115 

PART III. IN SERVIA. 

I The Retreat from Przemysl 129 

II A Glorious Catacomb 139 

III Prisoners and an American 151 

PART IV. WITH THE GERMANS IN FLANDERS. 

I Working Royalty 163 

II Night in the Trenches 187 

III Conquered France 207 

IV German Sword and Gallic Soul 221 



CONTENTS 

PART V. WITH THE RUSSIANS IN BUKOWINA. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I A Dead Center of War 2+1 

II Running the Lines from Czernowitz 257 

III In the Hands of Cossacks 268 

IV Holding Up a " Bandit " 285 

V Winter Fight and Philosophy 293 



FOREWORD 

Hungarian is an Asiatic language using Roman 
letters. So last November in Budapest William 
G. Shepherd of the United Press and I were puz- 
zled by placards on dead walls headed: hirdet- 
meny! 

" Sounds like some kind of crime," I said. 
" But what crime ? " (To this day I do not know 
what the word means.) 

" Murder, perhaps," said Shep. " They're 
advertising the finish of ' War Correspondents,' 
old style." 

Maybe the reporter is harder to kill. He is 
apt to care little for messing with generals, or to 
pose as a tactician. He knows that one comes 
closer to the realities of war by mingling afoot 
with peasantry and troopers, than when convoyed 
by staff officers and allowed to see only what they 
permit, to learn what they want him to know. 
He smiles at the pretensions of " War Corre- 
spondents," who ape military dress, soldiers' ways 
of conduct, and collect decorations. He wonders 
over the hullabaloo about making dodos of them, 
since they have existed chiefly in their own or 



x FOREWORD 

their newspapers' imaginations. And I ask, have 
those who mourn the halcyon days of Archibald 
Forbes ever read him without thinking of Black- 
stone and the Lucy Books in one? 

In this inane war many doors lay open to the 
various fronts. The reporter needed only per- 
sonal credentials, initiative, candour, and a sense 
of locality. I found no military official who did 
not treat me civilly, in doing his duty as he saw 
it; and this whether I was his involuntary guest, 
under arrest, or a mere intruder between the lines. 
If any of those doors are now shut to me I har- 
bour neither grief nor resentment. Each bellig- 
erent demands that you be partisan in what you 
write from the lines; that you conceal what he 
wants hidden, tell what he wants told. In the 
febrile political state of the capitals of Europe 
this policy of " He who is not for me is against 
me " is only natural. There you may be told 
that the whole truth will be welcomed, only to 
learn later that you have been fooled, and that a 
non-partisan whose job is to report and write 
life as he sees it cannot stay persona grata nowa- 
days with any fighting government. 

Poor old Mister Truth — Herr, Monsieur, or 
Gospadeen — who never is belligerent! I know 
that to prate of one's honesty opens it to suspi- 
cion. I cannot and I do not. I want only to 
plead for that personal sincerity in reporting with- 



FOREWORD xi 

out which recorded history is worthless; which de- 
mocracies hold to be one safeguard of civilisation. 
This war is putting it to the test; reporters, too, 
are " fighting for life " now. And yet the blind- 
ness, the official sophistries which often impeded 
me, seem in retrospect appealing, sometimes 
pathetic, in their humanity. One loves far less, 
judging from what I saw upon certain fronts, the 
authors of much that is written from such places, 
and marvels how some of them can sleep at night. 
And if ever after this war I see a " correspond- 
ent " wearing a military decoration! . . . 

This book tries to be a detached report of con- 
crete, human scenes in five zones of fighting. I 
believe that I saw or participated in them in the 
spirit of a true neutral. But full detachment is 
a cold-blooded virtue, and it is as barren to act 
or write with the feelings of a lizard as of a senti- 
mentalist. Moments come in the thick of things 
when one is carried off his feet, in sympathy, in 
scorn, in recklessness; which these pages, as fairly 
immediate transcripts, must reflect. Thus I have 
excuse to make and apology to offer no more for 
scoring the Austrians in Servia and reverencing 
the Lilleois of German France, than for homage 
to the British at St. Quentin, fellowship with the 
Russian invaders of Bukowina, or for firing two 
aimless shots from the Bavarian trenches. I 
think that in each instance I acted and have writ- 



xii FOREWORD 

ten naturally, honestly, as a reporter and a human 
being. 

No army nor foreign office in this war recog- 
nises as such reporters in the fullest and most 
serious sense of their aims. Therefore, since be- 
ing free agents is the prime condition of their ex- 
istence, they must provide their own standards 
of right and wrong, follow them at their own risk. 
Personally I hold it dishonourable to transmit 
from one enemy to another information of tac- 
tical value. But I would not hesitate to break 
any censorship upon social and political facts, or 
deeds violating the decencies of war. Personal 
conduct is to be governed by the orders and per- 
missions of the officers whom you are with, a 
matter which cares for itself, because no real neu- 
tral when he is among men sacrificing their lives 
— no matter how mistakenly — can fail to feel 
his heart leap and to bow in admiration for them. 
Just as they feel no venom against the enemy fac- 
ing them, it is never they who hamper the re- 
porter. Peace, if it comes before all Europe has 
made a Mexico of herself (as appears to me she 
very well may), will have its roots in that sub- 
lime brotherhood of all fighters which reigns 
along every front. 

For the rest, reporting is much a trick of ob- 
serving and interpreting; a problem of selection, 
like any art. Sometimes a particular scene, or 



FOREWORD xiii 

emotion, or personality, obtrudes as a keynote. 
Walker, the English bicycle scout at the battle 
of Le Cateau, was one. Such a being becomes the 
shaft of light between the inexpressible before 
your eyes, and the credulous darkness of the read- 
er's mind. I hope that I have conveyed as flesh 
and blood protagonists equally revealing men like 
the Bavarian Lieutenant Riegel, Captain She- 
chin the Russian Hussar, Ivan Tornich the 
American serb, and the soldier of Przemysl in 
the death-throes of cholera. 

Discretion has place in reporting, but decep- 
tion none. Luck is far less an element than good 
after-results may seem to imply. In the flush of 
success one forgets his planning and hard think- 
ing. Seeing clearly, like facing bullets, is a test 
of temperament, name it courage or any other 
quality more or less resounding. And war, for 
all its horror, may also be beautiful. I hold that 
the good reporter, like the good soldier, must look 
upon war as the supreme adventure in the great 
drama called Life. 

Carvel Hall, Annapolis, Maryland, 
April 9, 19 1 5. 



PART I 
WITH THE BRITISH IN FRANCE 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 

Paris, August 28, 19 14. — For two nights and 
most of three days the writer has been within the 
Allies' lines. All of Wednesday morning — the 
terrible August 26th — I was directly under the 
German fire. I can thus give the first eye-witness 
account of British operations on French soil 
against the principal invading German force. 

That, as the world now knows, was the master- 
ful retreat of the Expeditionary Force from the 
region of Mons, in Belgium, to Noyon, some sixty- 
five miles inside the French border. Foremost in 
this unique experience stands the glorious cheer, 
coolness, and morale of the English troops, under 
the most desperate conditions that even this un- 
tried modern warfare can impose: one to three 
they fought against Von Kluck's army, inflicting 
and receiving tremendous losses. In various 
places of the world I have stood before danger 
and suffering, but never in the past have I been so 
on the point of yielding in feeling to them as in 
these last seventy hours on the white roads and in 
the stacked wheat fields of the Nord. 

Prudence alone for my own safety — and not 



2 FIVE FRONTS 

from the arms of the Uhlans — made me return. 
In that forbidden military region, where any 
foreigner is remarked in peace times, I was be- 
coming altogether too conspicuous. The peasan- 
try were spy-mad, and yet I was only once ar- 
rested as a spy, and that by the civil authorities, 
to whom I proved innocence easily enough. It 
was the military who were to be feared, and, 
openly associating with both officers and men along 
the firing line, the danger of being caught as I 
was without permits from the staff grew ever more 
exciting and imminent. But it was rather a 
shameful luxury to have been for this time without 
my boots off, without sleep, and with little more 
than bread and cheese to eat, beside soldiers who 
had received no rations for three days, and who as 
they shuffled and dozed along would tell you of 
regiments 1,200 strong that at roll-call after bat- 
tle mustered but two officers and ioo men. 

Paris newspapers of August 25 declared the 
northern railways open as far as the village of 
Aulnoye, some nine miles south of the fortified 
border city of Maubeuge. In the same way the 
War Office announced that the Allies' lines in this 
region had fallen back to the main position north 
of that city and extending beyond the Belgian 
frontier near Valenciennes. At the commissariat 
of police in my Paris arrondissement, I got per- 
mission on my " permis de sejour " to leave the 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 3 

city, and a " sauf-conduit " to and from Aulnoye. 
These, my passport, and the policy of absolute 
frankness to all questioners saved me. Had that 
commissary known the location of Aulnoye, I 
doubt whether he would have issued me the pa- 
pers. A crowd was waiting in his office, and I 
vaguely assented to his vaguer question whether 
the village was not in the district of the North. 
But Aulnoye I never saw. 

I caught a noon train from the Gare du Nord, 
in khaki trousers, blue serge coat, golf cap, and 
the shirt of an American marine. All along the 
line France wrote the index of her life-struggle. 
Dusty soldiers in their scarlet bags of trousers 
and blue frock-like coats with tails buttoned back 
crowded the station platforms, singing, smoking, 
filling canvas w :er buckets for their horses at the 
platform taps. Boxcar troop trains packed with 
them and their womenfolk slid along the adjoin- 
ing track. Every siding was jammed by flatcars 
loaded with grey artillery pieces, with ammuni- 
tion wagons; with black, dome-roofed cars bear- 
ing the ominous " 40 hommes — 8 chevaux." 
Every station yard was a-litter from hay bales 
shipped north. 

Noyon swarmed with officers in pale blue coats 
and caps, with silver epaulettes, and a few cuiras- 
siers' brass helmets, from which long hair dangles 
behind. The uncut wheat lay in the fields flat- 



4 FIVE FRONTS 

tened from rain, the stacked mildewing; once I 
saw four old women unloading a rick into a barn. 
All that luxuriant country in the rich crisis of har- 
vest was empty, rotting. Engines linked together 
by the half-dozen rushed south, " from Belgium," 
as the stout, bearded man opposite in the carriage 
informed. " From Belgium," too, came the box- 
cars glutted with refugees; at the time he fooled 
me into believing that. The platform at St. 
Quentin swarmed with the British, in their flat 
caps and olive drab, so exactly like our army uni- 
form. 

It was getting dark and had been raining. 
The refugees now rode on open flat-cars, the 
distracted mothers in black holding umbrellas 
over the baby carriages. At Bohain my first- 
class compartment, long empty, filled with eight 
railway guards, who inspected me in a suspicious 
silence, and then promptly fell asleep. We were 
due at Aulnoye at eight o'clock, but it was past 
that now. The train halted at a town called 
Le Cateau, fifteen miles south of my destination. 
A being thrust his head into the window and 
muttered something rapidly, which woke the 
guards as if a rifle had gone off. The youngster 
in the next seat turned to me and said : 

" The Germans are all about Maubeuge. The 
train goes no further." 

I stepped out into the darkness of that strange 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 5 

place, Le Cateau, and into such a spectacle as no 
man can forget. I knew that then; it hardly 
would have heightened the feeling to know also 
that in twelve hours I should see the town 
ablaze. The guards dissolved into the noisy plat- 
form crowd, which carried paste-board bundles, 
baskets, babies. No one at the gate asked for 
my ticket or my papers. A half-visible squad of 
troops on the road passed rapidly, whistling a 
queer lively tune in unison. It was only when 
they broke feebly into the Marseillaise that I was 
sure they were French. And they were marching 
south. 

I made for a light, through an iron gateway 
in a high brick wall. In the middle of the en- 
closure a woman outlined in the doorway de- 
manded shrilly who I was and what I wanted. 
I asked for a hotel, and she directed on up the 
street, as two dogs broke forth furiously. Out- 
side, French troops were marching so densely 
that I had to brace and wait against the lightless 
brick houses of the narrow street, as it curved 
north, down into the hollow where the heart of 
Le Cateau lay. Suddenly I caught the impatient 
panting and the blinding shimmer of blocked au- 
tomobiles. In them as they followed south were 
British uniforms, with the meagre scarlet facings 
of staff officers. Then an immense clatter of 
hoofs, the jolt of heavy wheels — artillery, sup- 



6 FIVE FRONTS 

ply wagons, cavalry, the gleam on lances from 
more motors. It was the British in retreat — the 
British/ 

The town square was filled with them, already 
spreading their kits on the stone paving; with 
horses, motor-cars. It was half an hour after I 
had inquired at every lighted house for lodging 
before I found the Hotel du Mouton Blanc. At 
a long table in a windowless room behind the cafe 
I sat down to dinner with a dozen British officers, 
and gave those around me the two Paris news- 
papers printed in English of that morning. They 
read them with an eager disdain, and their com- 
ments first realised to me the grim drama into 
which I had stumbled, and their wonderful spirit 
under reverse. 

"The Earl of Leven wounded, eh?" said the 
young lieutenant of a Dorsetshire regiment on 
my right; "is that all they have?" (Leven's 
was for days the only casualty made public.) 
" We're rather well cut up, too. Five officers and 
240 men alive out of a thousand in that business 
around Vicq." 

It was the first bald chapter of the decimations 
that for the next two days officers and men re- 
peated to me, and always thus, as if they were 
but remembering from a book of statistics; with 
never a quiver of the voice or eye; not as if they 
might betray down-heartedness or sorrow, but ac- 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 7 

tually as if such things, in their sublime assur- 
ance, were inconceivable. That saying as old as 
history, that the Englishman never knows when 
he is beaten, may have appealed to me before as 
a figure of speech. In a flash I read its literal- 
ness. 

A comrade of the lieutenant's came in. The 
pair had not met since the battle began three days 
before, and they named over in the same matter- 
of-fact way brother officers — dead. 

" I say," the newcomer leaned over toward me, 
" how is that cheese there? " 

They asked me no questions, but I was quite 
frank with them, even gave the Dorsetshire offi- 
cer, whose name was Burnand, my card. I told 
the same story that I repeated afterwards to 
whomever accosted me : that I was an American 
correspondent, who, having applied in proper 
form, with the required sworn declaration, to ac- 
company the French army, had come north to look 
at the country where fighting might occur, and 
been caught by the British withdrawal. 

" Well, if I were you," said the cavalry cap- 
tain across the table, significantly, " I'd get out of 
here the first thing in the morning." 

"Why?" I demanded. "Are you going to 
arrest me? " 

He simply stared through me and said: 

" The Germans aren't five miles north of this 



8 FIVE FRONTS 

bally place now. They'll be shelling it before six 
o'clock." 

In the passage-way a baby was crying with re- 
lentless piteousness. The mother, in a huge black 
picture hat, did her best at soothing, but the 
shrieks got on Burnand's mind — so he said, at 
least. 

" Oh, choke that youngster," he kept mutter- 
ing. " I'm nervous as a cat. I think I'd jump if 
I heard a door slam." 

Nervous! After the carnage he had survived, 
the mess-mates he had seen slaughtered, he 
drawled this. He was no more nervous than any 
Englishman of his caste is after a cricket game. 
I never used to believe in caste; but, if it made 
that young fellow what he was then, I do. 

" To-morrow the row'll be over toward Cam- 
brai, too," said the moustached captain. (Cam- 
brai was a larger town ten miles west-north- 
west). " They burnt Vertain and Solesmes, just 
above here, this afternoon." 

Here and in the cafe outside, though always re- 
fraining from asking directly, I gathered details 
of the fighting retreat lasting since Monday. 
Crowded before, the square was a spectacle which 
only Meissonier could have portrayed. The 
khaki swarm had tripled, massed around the blaze 
and crackle of camp fires alone lighting the scene. 
Unsaddled cavalry horses, automobiles piled with 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 9 

sleepers, infantry hacking open tinned beef, cav- 
alrymen lying down to doze in their long coats, 
jammed the last inch of space. Opposite, in the 
ranked windows of the " Ecole des jeunes filles," 
the staff headquarters, showed the pale blue of 
mantle gas jets shining all night upon the wounded. 

But it was inside the Mouton Blanc that the 
heroisms and ignominies of war best came into 
their own. Men of a Welsh regiment, finding I 
could speak English, crowded about in the exact, 
pitiful ignorance that Zola insists upon. " Where 
are we? " they asked. " In France or Belgium? " 
Le Cateau tongue-tied them, and each produced 
a little blank-book and made me write the name 
for him. " There," laughed one of them. " So 
if they pick me up after the Germans get me, the 
old lady'll know where it happened." It seemed 
as if I never stopped giving out cigarettes, light- 
ing them; they had no money, and had not been 
paid since coming to France. " France " — as a 
red-haired sergeant said — " a blooming fine coun- 
try, if the people weren't so oncivilised." 

The attack of Sunday was drawn, and the pres- 
ent force, probably the British centre, had re- 
tired from around Mons to the vicinity of Vicq, 
over the border from Valenciennes. On Monday 
the cavalry were to attack the German artillery, 
supported by a French column from the east. 
The enemy, in far greater numbers, had sur- 



io FIVE FRONTS 

rounded themselves with barbed wire, and the 
French failed to show up. It was here that the 
slaughter was so severe. The infantry, finding 
it useless to join in, had begun the retirement 
south on Monday afternoon, the rest at daylight 
to-day (August 25). All had been on the march 
ever since, with the Germans close to their heels, 
and burning every village on the roads. 

" Brought down two of their planes this morn- 
ing, just the same. You ever seen them? Got 
wings like eagles." 

" Remember that shrapnel, right over our 
heads." 

" It was the rain this afternoon saved us." 

" Of course, they're mowing us down — 90,- 
ooo-odd against 24,000." (This moderate esti- 
mate likely only included the opposed wings.) 
" But we're getting more of them. Why, the 
blighters can't shoot a rifle. All our fellows' 
wounds are from shrapnel exploding overhead. 
And they squeal like pigs at bayonets. Can't 
stand the steel, y' know." 

" We're drawing them down into France like 
a bait, where the Frenchies can fight them on 
their own ground. The English is on the defen- 
sive," explained the red sergeant. " Then the 
French are to close in on them from both sides, 
catch them like rats in a trap." 

All at once a little corporal at my elbow, who 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS n 

had been eying me in silence, said, " They've 
just arrested a spy across the street." 

"Have they?" I asked, without a quiver, I 
think, but with a quick burning in my chest. 
" And what was he doing? " 

" Hanging too close around headquarters. 
One of our men spotted him, and they led him 
away — blindfolded. You know what that 
means." 

I had not yet been to the police with my papers 
as I should have done. But now I talked a while 
longer, and at the first pause leisurely left the 
cafe, and picked a way through the prone, weary 
bodies to the office seen in my first round of the 
square. The official mannikin there simply 
shrugged his shoulders at the red seal on my pass- 
port, and stamped the sauf-conduit with cer- 
tainly the last impression his little machine has 
given. 

At midnight the two women who ran the White 
Sheep started to shoo the throng out. It took 
them half an hour, and it was not until the last 
private had gone and the door was closed — and 
the baby and the picture hat abed upstairs — that 
I realised the pluck of that pair. It is through 
them, as much as from the blind, contemptuous 
self-confidence of Tommy Atkins, that Le Cateau 
becomes unforgettable. One was young and rosy- 
cheeked, but the other and head of the house, a 



12 FIVE FRONTS 

sallow, thin being, with lined cheeks and a pointed 
jaw, began to relate to me how many hundred 
meals she had served that day, how in her bad 
health the village doctor had warned her that she 
must have rest and sleep, though she would be up 
at four in the morning, making coffee. 1 

I wonder — I doubt — if she is alive now. 

" Hein ! " she summed up the evening, with 
the national nod and gesture of both hands to her 
hips, at all the litter and wreckage on the floor, 
" C'est la guerre." 

In that, and the next few moments, she epi- 
tomised the French just as much as Burnand or 
any of the rest had summed the Briton. When 
she had helped me lift two of the leather wall 
benches into the centre of the cafe, and thrown on 
them a great striped mattress for my bed, I asked 
whether she would flee south in the morning. 

"Go? Go away from Le Cateau — from 
my village — from the Mouton Blanc? Why 
should I go? The German pigs will not touch 
me," she averred with a sublime calm, though her 
beady eyes flashed. " Come, we will have a bot- 
tle of champagne. I have been keeping it for 
years." 

And from somewhere the red-cheeked girl pro- 
duced that bulging big bottle and three slim 

1 British officers seen later in Paris told me that these women 
were German spies. 



THE RETREAT FROM MONS 13 

glasses. It had no label, but was of some good 
old vintage, though a bit sweet, and we filled 
and refilled with the hissing stuff, drinking: 
" Vive la France ! " and gossiping about les beaux 
Anglais, and her son who was with the army to 
the east, until quite two o'clock. 



II 



THE BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 

The thing that toward four o'clock stirred me 
from the doze I was just falling into strikes the 
keynote, I think, better than anything else in 
those vivid three days, of this epochal war. 
There was no reveille, no sound of a bugle ; only, 
echoing through the silence and ashen light of that 
square, the cry: 

"Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!" And again, 
and repeated, " Doctor! " 

Over in the girls' school some one — lord or 
Manchester apprentice — was in his throes. As 
morning broke I slipped out alone into the square, 
now nearly empty. The last of the infantry were 
trailing off westward through the town; the cav- 
alry and artillery up the street I had descended in 
the night. I followed them. 

All along to the railroad station on the hill, 
which was deserted and locked, the folk of Le 
Cateau stood in knots upon the curb. Not at 
their doorsteps, mind, which is the place for gos- 
sip, but speechless, drawn-faced, loaded with cloth 
bundles linked to throw upon their shoulders, 
turning heads from their homes toward a flight 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 15 

they knew not where. I took up a position on 
top of the hill, where for an hour the pathetic 
stream grew and swept southeast toward La 
Groise, while southward on the St. Quentin road, 
after the artillery and cavalry, and on the route 
I had resolved to take, trudged an endless stream 
of peasants' wagons. 

Sunlight began to glance across the rolling 
fields, yellow with stacked wheat sheaves, through 
the delicate bosks of willows. Toward six 
o'clock, suddenly boomed out the heavy staccato 
of artillery, as yet invisible. Then along the 
brow of the opposite ridge to the north, not a mile 
away, appeared long lines of racing heads — cav- 
alry from their undulating motion, the Uhlans, 
though the summit hid their horses. Puck-puck. 
. . . Puck-puck-puck, broke out bullets from ma- 
chine guns on all the roofs around. 

I sat on a stone at the entrance of an inn-yard. 
The increasing fire, too high yet by thirty feet 
to hurt, neither quickened the speed of the pro- 
cession passing under the railway bridge nor made 
a single face turn. Behind the inn, a two-horse 
'bus which had long been waiting empty, filled 
with the stout proprietor, his wife in black baize 
carrying a thrush in a wooden cage, and their 
three bare-legged boys. They trundled away. 
All at once not a vehicle or refugee was in sight; 
and then, up the empty street, came the last of 



1 6 FIVE FRONTS 

them, a woman. She could not have been less 
than eighty years old, and was all alone. Clad in 
her best black, without goods of any sort, she 
wore a quaint poke bonnet, riding in a small two- 
wheeled rick. Brave, stolid, tearless, perched on 
her high nest of clean straw, she croaked the cry, 
that of every driver who had passed, to her 
stumbling, skinny pony : " Vi ! Vi ! Vi ! " — and 
vanished. 

Of those who quitted it all, I think that I was 
the last to leave Le Cateau. As the clatter of 
bullets descended, I edged along this upper road, 
the bottle of spring water I had taken from the 
White Sheep in my hand, toward a brick factory 
with a grotesque tin windshield on its chimney. 
Suddenly across the valley, and behind where the 
German cavalry still were passing, appeared a 
mass of English artillery, and the sight of them 
sweeping down the slope, swinging to park them- 
selves behind the cover of a grove, was stirring 
in its perfectness. A bullet — a wild shot — 
pricked up the dust not ten feet from my stand, 
and I slipped behind the factory, just as the ma- 
chine-gun rattle broke out upon its splintering win- 
dows. 

The shrapnel, too, was growing louder and 
closer. In modern battles, of course, with the 
front extending fifteen miles or more — perhaps 
of only one wing — you cannot pick the site of 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 17 

butchery, especially when only afoot. An old 
man in a blue jumper came out of a shed, and 
started dumbly with me down the fields to the 
now vacant Bohain-St. Quentin road, where the 
cavalry had passed, and in the direction of the 
Germans. There was a bridge and stream there, 
making back toward a mill under the railway em- 
bankment, and the fellow headed toward this, 
as I sat waiting in a ditch for fully half an 
hour. 

Nearby lay a horse, his legs horizontally not 
touching the ground, as always in the first mo- 
ments of death. The parked artillery should 
have been but a rod away, but I could not find 
them. Only the German shells, passing lower 
overhead with their peculiar, steely elastic whif- 
fling — like loud invisible ghosts — sent me off 
again. The peasants along the road, aroused 
later than the people of the town, were just be- 
ginning to emerge from behind their hedges. In 
about a mile I caught up with an old couple. 
The man was lame and hobbled on a white stick, 
his wife carried nothing but a little basket, and 
when I tried to take it from her, to help her 
along, she resisted me. 

u C'est epouvantable," I said. 

" Non, non," she muttered. " J'ai de la dou- 
leur — douleur." 

Grief — that strange French word. How 



1 8 FIVE FRONTS 

much it always means, but on her thin lips its 
force was — universal. 

Soon a drab line of bicycle scouts came along, 
but heading back toward Le Cateau. I told them 
of the cavalry up on the slope. " Yes," said 
their freckled leader, " it's a circling movement, 
to the east around the town." As they wheeled 
on, the last in line stared with his eyes fixed on 
the bottle of water, and I heard him mutter to 
the man ahead something which sounded like 
" spy." Then came the trundling ammunition 
wagons, and on the last of them, sprawled on 
his back, all his limbs bobbing nervelessly, with 
blanched face and open mouth, lay a youngster 
wounded. Next cavalry. One fellow with 
a small moustache beckoned me, for a drink, I 
thought, but when I offered him the bottle, he 
shoved it almost angrily aside, and I gave him 
the cigarette he wanted, for he had seen me 
smoking. 

Two young women, each wheeling a baby car- 
riage, passed. 

" Look at those blighters," said the trooper, 
feelingly. " It's them that's getting it worse 
than any of us boys. Our business, this. But 
them — it's they we should collect the account 
from Kaiser Bill for. Hello, there's one of our 
'planes." 

A biplane, a Voisin, by its shorter under wing, 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 19 

was clattering up from the south. A motorcycle, 
with a big scout buried to his ears in a greenish 
raincoat, zizzed past toward Le Cateau. Paus- 
ing, he shouted something, and the squad of cav- 
alry turned and sprang up a lane to the right. 
Beyond more stood up there. A little village 
close down the slope swarmed with them, wait- 
ing on both sides of the road. But when the first 
horseman was close, for what reason I cannot now 
explain, I threw the glass bottle into the ditch. 
Did they think I was offering them poison, or 
that the thing was some signal for the watching 
enemy? 

Just beyond the houses, appeared the elusive 
artillery. In crossing from fields on the left to 
the right side of the road at furious speed, a box 
of biscuits from a supply wagon jolted out and 
smashed, scattering its contents. A square-faced 
young peasant with the bloom of outdoors, in 
brown corduroy trousers, who had been dogging 
me, asked rough questions in his patois, threw off 
his coat and filled it with the grub, which he prof- 
fered. Over the biscuits we reached an under- 
standing, and I consented to hint who I was. 

" An American," I said, as we trudged on. 

" Maroc?" he stared. " Maroccan? " (Mor- 
occan.) 

I could not make him comprehend. It was in- 
deed to wonder, among the many misdoubts of 



20 FIVE FRONTS 

republicanism you get in France, on the quality of 
popular schooling. 

On top of the rise, one looked back two miles, 
clear to the roofs of Le Cateau showing above its 
hollow, and dominated by the great Roman dome 
of the town church. The motor-scout in the rain- 
coat shot past, returning; stopped under an elm 
tree. When I approached him, he recognised 
having passed me back on the road, and I volun- 
teered the true and consistent reason for my pres- 
ence. He was a huge, placid being with curly 
sorrel hair. The coat hid his rank or rating, and 
at first he answered nothing except to point back 
at Le Cateau, and say: 

" Look at her burn. Already." 

Dense clouds of smoke rose to the left of the 
church. Further north (that direction) the wink- 
ing flashes of artillery, the scattering detonations, 
with their potent, killing sound, showed the ene- 
my's position. 

" Do they fire all these towns with shrapnel? " 
I asked. 

" No. Generally with petrol, when they're in- 
side." 

A bearded peasant in a black shirt and sus- 
penders ran past toward the conflagration, to- 
ward home and family, surely, crying in falsetto, 
" Le Cateau incends!" The boy in corduroy 
laughed at him in a foolish way. The scout 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 21 

looked hungrily across the road, where he was eat- 
ing biscuits, and remarked that he had had no 
breakfast. I fetched him a couple, and for awhile 
we sat under a wheat-cock munching in silence. 
Down in the hollow the great mass of cavalry- 
were beginning some manoeuvre at a gallop. 

" Wait," said the scout, rising. " You'll see 
something." And he went on to explain how the 
force in sight was preparing to take the offensive 
against the turning movement of the Germans to 
the east, which the cyclists had spoken of. To- 
ward that quarter the land sloped upward. One 
mass of the cavalry, under cover of the artillery, 
who were to open fire as soon as the former rushed 
the approaching enemy's position, from the con- 
cealment of the rise, ranged themselves in the 
open. To the right and close at hand, the sup- 
porting cavalry gathered behind a dense grove, 
hidden and ready to swing out and overpower. 

" They're wizards, these Germans," said the 
scout, " at masking their artillery." 

Till well past noon we waited for this conflict. 
But the hours went like lightning. The shell 
fire around the town waxed furious. Pale flashes 
pricked themselves out yonder, like a long fuse 
lighting intermittently at dozens of points. Over 
the drifting haze from the invisible guns, the 
bursting shrapnel showed itself in shapes of tiny, 
woolly-white clouds spawning in the clear sky, 



22 FIVE FRONTS 

expanding magically. Though the wind was 
strongly toward them, the thundering, the ugly 
menace, was deafening, desolating. Sometimes 
smoke hid the church dome. Powder gleams 
broke out between us and it. A few shells burst 
directly over the hamlet where the cavalry had 
been, not a quarter-mile away. 

" They're getting our range," said my friend. 
" We better get out of this." 

But we no more than crossed the road to the 
foolish cover of a larger tree. The scout, 
who had left his motorcycle against the wheat- 
sheaves, sauntered back for it, remarking, " That 
was silly of me." Peasants from the next village 
south, Busigny, grouped around us, and he idly 
warned them away. A beautiful, dark-faced girl, 
with raven hair, approached him, and said with a 
deliberate winningness — French of the French 
that she was in those thrilling moments : 

" Monsieur, vous n'avez pas peur? " 

Flirting on the battlefield! Who but a Fran- 
chise? 

The man seemed not to hear her. The youth 
in corduroy was gazing with his tongue out. A 
grey touring car with three officers, two English 
and a French cuirassier, which had flown past be- 
fore, halted and they got out, pointing and open- 
ing their maps. As the scout joined them, I dis- 
creetly backed off twenty yards, not to be seen lis- 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 23 

tening to the talk. The Englishman, a stout, sal- 
low man with the ratings of a major, was the 
ranking officer; the other was grizzle-haired and 
very thin; the Frenchman, with the brass ridge 
down the back of his helmet like those you see on 
ancient coins, and horse hair hanging to the mid- 
dle of his back — in scarlet trousers and azure 
coat — looked comic-opera-like, an impertinence. 
And plainly he was a supernumerary, bobbing 
about unheeded, in the conference which, from 
the Englishmen's gestures, showed the strategy 
going to their satisfaction. It must have been an 
hour before they tooled away, and in that time, 
to. my chagrin, the artillery fire seemed to relax; 
though all at once close to, in the woods to the 
left, but aiming away from us, broke out a second 
focus of flashing thunder. 

" Our guns," said the scout, as I returned to 
him. " We're driving them." 

The cavalry below were breaking positions, 
galloping in all directions. More appeared on 
the ridge south of where the enemy had been ex- 
pected. On our opposite side, long lines of troops 
— infantry — marched south on a hidden road. 
Another motor-scout, even younger, red-faced and 
lithe, with a tiny black moustache, dashed up for a 
moment, and as he left turned to me, demanding 
briskly, " I say, by the way, what are you doing 
here?" But he rode off before I could answer, 



24 FIVE FRONTS 

bidding so-long to my first friend, calling him by 
name, " Walker." 

Again we were alone on the bank under the 
barbed wire fence, except for the peasants. It was 
covered with red clover, and all at once I found 
a four-leaved specimen and gave it to " Mr. 
Walker," who stuck it in his cap with a vague 
smile. The boy in corduroys began to gag and 
point into the sky over the marching infantry, 
where the rattle of cylinders had again broken 
forth. 

" German 'plane, by — ! " exclaimed the scout. 
" Look at her turned-back wings." 

By the angle in each 'plane, the resemblance to 
an eagle, or a buzzard, was uncanny. It was 
steering straight for us, some 500 metres high, 
but before the breathless instant when it hung 
straight overhead and then banked away east- 
ward, the infantry massed on the other road gave 
it a crackling defiance with their rifles. 

" Our men over there, then," said Walker, 
cranking his cycle. " I was wondering who they 
were," he drawled, and without a word of parting 
whisked away down the rear slope. 

The cavalry, too, were withdrawing. I saw my 
chance of seeing any carnage vanish. There was 
nothing to do but retreat also, in company with the 
ejaculatory peasant, and join the baby carriage 
procession forming from all the houses in the vil- 



BATTLE OF LE CATEAU-CAMBRAI 25 

Iage of Busigny. At last the boy left me — turned 
abruptly with a curt adieu and his coatful of Eng- 
lish crackers into the high hedge of the first brick 
farm — pondering over Walker's manner at his 
job. 

Plainly it was he who had been responsible for 
the operations at this small point of the terrible 
fight on that August 26. Yet not once had he 
shown the smallest worry, the least tension. He 
had never raised his voice, more than smiled in- 
scrutably. Often in levelling his glasses he had 
seemed exasperatingly slow, not to say stupid, in 
distinguishing lines of trees from troops, and so 
forth. His calm was exasperating; he did not 
even seem alert; half a dozen times I had called at- 
tention to distant movements, at which he would 
say, first taking a bite of biscuit, " Ah, yes. I 
must look at that," and languidly level his binocu- 
lars. I bethought myself of an American on such 
a job — his tiptoe, braced concentration. But 
could I swear to any gain in efficiency by that? 



Ill 



ST. QUENTIN AND THE AFTERMATH 

Busigny poured forth its placid, terrorised 
mothers and old men. All seemed too poor for 
travelling in vehicles. I found myself behind a 
couple, on one side their little girl hugging a tiger 
kitty in her cape, on the other a tow-haired boy of 
twelve with a great pair of boots clasped on his 
arms. Out of a courtyard swung a dog-cart, 
drawn by two brindle hounds, its load covered with 
a pink tablecloth. It was too heavy for the poor 
dogs, unwieldy for the woman and child, who 
guided it from behind. For quite a kilometre I 
helped them, shoving from the gutter as the beasts 
ran amuck in their haste, urging on the panting 
dogs when they lay down exhausted. And then, 
after we struck a slope, I watched them rumble off 
— the peasant's big splay feet furiously trudging 
in her shapeless shoes, shoulders swinging in her 
black waist which yet had a touch of elegance in its 
cut. 

Enraging — the word was not enough, with 
that ruthless booming and those bloody hearts so 
close behind. But branding savagery with venom 
is quite useless. It was useless, too, trying to 

26 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 27 

soften the tragedy by remembering that the fore- 
bears of these folk, for the 500 years from Philip 
II to Napoleon, had endured just such terror and 
eviction. The home is the home, gunpowder and 
the sword its curse, whether to white lord, French 
peasant, or Hottentot. 

I stopped in a dingy cafe for a glass of home- 
brewed beer, sitting at the table by an old man with 
one tooth in his withered jaws. He had seven 
grandsons at the front, he told me. He was a 
weaver " de tissu," he explained, " all for the 
American trade; " this with a craftsman's twirl of 
his fingers, when I had claimed my nationality. 
He had seen the Prussians forty-four years ago 
march down this same road. No; he was not go- 
ing — he had nowhere to go. 

The rumble of heavier firing brought me out- 
side. Twice I started back up the Le Cateau 
road, twice returned. This new outburst was far- 
ther west, toward Cambrai, where it now seems 
that the Gordon Highlanders were being so cruelly 
slaughtered even then. My police papers only 
allowed a return to Paris on that day; the British 
were getting to know me too well. To be discov- 
ered back-trailing in this guarded, forbidden region 
might be fatal. My case, if I were taken, might 
hang on the personality and mood of the first of- 
ficer faced, and at this time of such terrible losses, 
in this march on which the fate of France and Eng- 



28 FIVE FRONTS 

land, at least, depended, indulgence was the last 
thing to expect. 

Anyhow, I could not have reached that focus of 
fighting before dark. I headed south for Bohain, 
covering the last four of the ten miles on foot from 
Le Cateau, utterly ignorant of the surprise in wait 
for me there. 

Bohain is — or was? — a smaller town than Le 
Cateau, but with wider streets. I made for the 
railway station, which was barred as usual; got 
bread, cheese, and red wine in the buffet hotel, 
and asked a train guard in a red cap where I could 
charter a wagon to drive to St. Quentin. This 
was impossible, he said, in the glut of refugees; 
nor could I hire a bicycle, though one might be 
bought. He took me opposite the mairie to a 
store full of wheels, but I thought their prices too 
stiff. I wanted to tell the woman in the blue waist 
who sold them that she might as well give me one, 
as to-morrow the Germans would be with her; 
but so certain and gloomy a prophecy might arouse 
suspicion. Vain care. As a fact, what happened 
was likely a piece of spite on the red-cap's part, he 
having some tie with the woman. 

I left him outside the shop, and was headed for 
the Hotel du Nord on a last try for a wagon, 
when a shout went up behind me, and a hand fell 
on my shoulder. 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 29 

From doorways, alleys, side-streets, crowds 
scurried across the cobbles, as though I were a 
dog-fight "Espion! Espion! (spy)," went up 
cries from the dense, menacing mob, of which in- 
stantly I was the centre. The fingers that gripped 
me belonged to a Teuton-looking creature with a 
pointed blonde beard. A hollow feeling crept 
under my ribs, but I had sense enough not to shake 
him off, and to brace my wits. 

" Wohin gehen Sie? " demanded he, letting go. 

" To St. Quentin," I answered, in French. 

" But that is not the road to St. Quentin which 
we find you taking," said, in English, a short, sal- 
low man in a felt hat. Score one for them. All 
around the notes of anger became derisive. I 
started to explain in English about the Hotel du 
Nord and a carriage; but the first fellow cut in, 
roughly : 

" Sprechen Sie Deutsch? " 

" Je ne comprends pas," I said, " parlez Ang- 
lais." 

Score two. "Ah!" exclaimed the pointed 
beard, triumphantly. 

" You answer him, you understand, when he 
asks you in German where you are going," ex- 
plained the other. " Then you say you cannot 
speak German." 

" Look here," I said, with a good English cuss- 



30 FIVE FRONTS 

word. " Do you think I'm a spy — espion?" 

" Si! " shouted the crowd. " Si! " And my 
captors nodded. 

Then all gave gangway to a dumpy, bald little 
man, with eye-glasses on a gold chain, who plainly, 
from his interceding, worried air, had been listen- 
ing on the fringes. 

" Monsieur le maire," indicated the felt hat, 
and they all fell jabbering among themselves. 
Blonde beard repeated the damning evidence of 
his verbal ruse, but I saw at once that in the 
mayor, gesticulating and declaring that I was Eng- 
lish, lay a partisan. 

" I'm an American," I corrected him, whipping 
out my passport. " Who are these two — de- 
tectives? " 

" Detectives of the police," said the sallow one. 

" Then let's go to the police station," I said, 
" so you can see all my papers." 

We started, ploughing through the eddying, 
noisy crowd. I beguiled the felt hat with the 
same true, plausible story told to the British. On 
the mayor's desk, just inside the grey stone build- 
ing, I spread out every paper and card I had — 
even my Navy pass used at Vera Cruz. The po- 
lice papers he studied under a stubby finger, mut- 
tering, holding his glasses half way between them 
and his eyes; he even massaged the red seal on the 
passport, nodding with proper official unction, and 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 31 

laid a friendly paw on my coat. By the time the 
sallow man had translated each English sentence, 
the day was won, and the mayor got busy with the 
municipal stamper to allow me to enter St. Quentin. 
Only the creature so proud of his dialectics re- 
mained sullen, kept going over his case, as more to 
explain than accuse. But I had had to prove that 
my knowledge of German was limited to " Kenn 
nicht," and " Liebst du." 

Pocketing my papers, I was only shy of the 
throng still around; and that most as a matter of 
injured pride. Out went the felt hat and shouted 
to them, and when he came back for me, and we 
crossed to the same bicycle store, all were hang- 
ing idly on the corners, gazing unconvinced but ap- 
peased. I felt my cue was to quit the place as fast 
as possible, and since by wheel was the only way, 
I blew myself to the dearest one in the blue lady's 
stock. The sallow man helped pump up the tires, 
and as we shook hands out in the street leading to- 
ward St. Quentin, I reflected how no man like me, 
American or not, would have stood any show if 
he knew German, and thanked my stars that it was 
the civil, not the military, authority into whose 
hands I had fallen. They were easy. 

It was sixteen miles to St. Quentin. But I had 
not gone two before I ran into friend Walker, the 
motor-scout, leaning his machine against a stone 
water trough. Already having confided in him 



32 FIVE FRONTS 

my apprehensions, how the lines had closed about 
me, I remarked, " Well, I got pinched after all," 
and he answered my laugh with his usual unbetray- 
ing smile. 

" Been running down this way," he said, rather 
thickly, " to see if I could be of any use. It's — 
it's been a bad day, I'm afraid." 

" To the westward — Cambrai? " 

" Yes. But we can't tell much yet." 

A double motor-cycle, bearing a set-faced 
woman nurse in white, shot up the road thither. 
A stout girl panted up to us, and began to ask 
Walker's advice whether or not she should quit 
her home. Behind, the noise of battle was flag- 
ging. 

" Tell, her," said he to me, as I interpreted, 
" that it's safer to leave it for a couple of days. 
Then go back." 

And always, like the Cheshire cat, he disap- 
peared abruptly. 

The girl called the Germans " Les Prussiens " 
— as all the peasants did. 

I pedalled on south and soon caught up with a 
young civilian in spectacles, who looked like a 
student. He had been making a sort of century 
run on his wheel through surrounding towns, and 
the war seemed remote as America to him. We 
entered St. Quentin together, I leaving him in its 
wooded Champs Elysees, to seek out the police 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 33 

station and forestall suspicion by getting my papers 
stamped for the trip to Paris. Surely here the 
railroad was still running. 

But nothing was more astounding than the 
change that came over that quiet old city in the 
next hours. A place of some 50,000 people, 
equidistant with Rheims and Amiens from Paris, 
its twelfth-century church is " starred " in Baed- 
eker, together with the exquisite pointed arches 
of the mediaeval Hotel de Ville, where the police 
commissariat was. The prefect there vised me 
without question. A few English officers were 
shooting about in grey motors, but for the rest the 
place was normal. Trolleys were running, and 
the only railroad station, where in trying to check 
my bicycle, I lost a train just leaving, two hours 
late, was jammed with refugees. At the foot of 
the hill, across the canal, I got a regular dinner in 
the Hotel Metropole. Crowded it was, of course, 
so I had to hire the proprietor's windowless sit- 
ting-room, with a piano and queer draperies, to lie 
down for a wink on the sofa until the 1 1 :30 train 
left. 

I was wakened by two officers, one French and 
one English, bursting into the room, and starting 
to spread blankets on the floor. The first hardly 
noticed me, but the second stared so, that I re- 
marked sleepily that I was an American. " Yes," 
answered he, curtly, " I can see that." What he 



34 FIVE FRONTS 

may have had in mind I never knew. A knowl- 
edge of my trespass, in the turmoil reigning with- 
out, might have just been barely overlooked. 

The hotel, the square, were in an uproar. It 
was Le Cateau over again, amid a population five 
times its size. Groaning motor-buses, the thud 
of artillery and ammunition wagons, the clatter of 
cavalry, of lancers — all except infantry — the 
shouts of officers, some carrying maps in their 
hands, filled the clear night. You could not force 
through the surging crowd of citizens outside the 
station. Suddenly as I waited there, arose the 
shout, " Gangway for the wounded! " 

Down the hill was coming a long line of huge 
motors, each roofed with canvas, and bearing on 
both sides a great red cross. For more than an 
hour a double stream of them halted at both en- 
trances to the station, disgorging the wounded. 
Some could walk, their heads already swathed in 
white; all struggled to. Most were carried, their 
arms around the necks of two comrades, who 
linked hands under them. A few were open- 
mouthed and very pale, many asleep or uncon- 
scious. The crowds stared, awed and breathless, 
until an exclamation of pity burst out from some 
woman loaded with her baby or the household 
goods. 

No train that night for any but the dying. 
(None at all in the morning.) Back in the cafe of 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 35 

the Metropole, filling with exhausted officers, the 
tables were all askew and some chairs overturned. 
The pink-cheeked young wife of the proprietor 
was serving cheese and coffee in tall glasses to 
whoever wanted them, free. Spoken to, she an- 
swered incomprehensively, and hurried behind her 
counter. A bronzed cavalry captain, thirstily sip- 
ping his coffee, was telling a brother officer with a 
dust-stained face, how in one place the ground had 
been so ploughed with shells that he could not pick 
a way among them. 

" We're beaten, all along," he said. " Done 
— that's what we are." 

And when a Briton admits that — ! But it was 
only the reflex groan of an instant. 

" Forty thousand French, y' know, ought to 
have attacked from the west at eleven this morn- 
ing," he went on. " Had forty miles to march, 
and didn't come up till too late. Not much left of 
the Ninth Lancers, they say." 

" Fighting four days now without a rest," re- 
viewed another. " Well, the Germans boasted 
they'd be in Paris in eight from the frontier, and 
it isn't half way to here. We'll stand them off 
yet. This drawing scheme, to fight in the French- 
men's own country, is bound to win." 

" Hear the French got at them after dark," 
recovered the first speaker, " mashed them like 
flies." And wholly braced from his moment of 



36 FIVE FRONTS 

despair, he had the generosity to add, " They're 
making a wonderful advance, these Germans." 

" Of fifty-eight men with me, I mustered five at 
six o'clock." 

" Infantry scattered all over the country, look- 
ing for companies that have been wiped out." 

" It's — it's staggering." 

And a third officer went on to tell how he had 
shot a German officer behind a tree, on refusing 
to surrender. Wounded, two peasants had helped 
him off to the German lines. " They'll get blamed 
for it, of course, and killed if the fellow dies. 
These poor people — it's they, not us, who suffer 
in the end most." 

That calm indomitable spirit of the English — 
beaten yet unaware of it; decimated, but still con- 
fidently holding ground and pitying for respite. 
Clear-headed, resolute, facing the issue cheerfully, 
not self-deceived ! Frankly, I felt a kind of anger. 
Twice, perhaps, at critical moments the French 
had failed them, but of reproach, even of criticism, 
in all those three days, I heard not one word. In 
this great drawing movement, the English, who do 
not know how to run, had been given the ever- 
desperate role of the defensive. In Paris I had 
heard, unbelievingly, of a quid pro quo, demanded 
and conceded by the French, as the price of British 
intervention. Could this strategy be in part the 
discount levied? No! Yet but one thing was 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 37 

sure — the undying loyalty and brave resolution 
of those English, the noble English. One's life is 
worth less than such a concrete vision of human- 
kind. 

The cafe was filling with refugees. All night 
no one got a wink of sleep. Already the hotel 
force had disappeared, and I did not again see the 
great moustachios of the proprietor. The brunt 
of everything fell on his scared, bustling wife. 
All night she served coffee to arriving, wilted 
fighters. Some lay trying to doze on the padded 
leather benches, but the plaintive chatter of 
mothers — the billiard table with a mattress on it 
was a veritable creche — was less distracting in 
volume than in its subdued tragicness. All night 
the crash of wagons, the snort of motors, the 
champ of hoofs, echoed on the cobbles without. 

Before daylight most of the officers had gone. 
I waited around as long as I dared, resolved, how- 
ever, at least to give the appearance of sticking to 
the Paris road. In a barber shop next door I 
killed time by getting a shave and a shampoo. 
There, everywhere, the word had passed that the 
city would be shelled that morning, and the Uh- 
lans in possession by night. But the sight which 
was the reward of all lay across the Somme canal, 
in the Place du Huit Octobre, by the monument to 
the defence of the town against the Germans in 
1870. 



3 8 FIVE FRONTS 

Here was the working heart of the Expedi- 
tionary Force in full blast. A modern army, 
vividly on the job. Red-capped staff officers ar- 
rived and dashed away, to report, to give orders, 
clattering on great bay horses, surging in motors. 
Changing incessantly in person, grey-haired gener- 
als, colonels, aides — some with gold eye-glasses, 
all elegant — with armfuls of fluttering maps, 
shouted quiet commands to forces making off on 
the radiating streets in all directions toward the 
country. Long lines of artillery, of ammunition, 
supply wagons, endless cavalry, seemed to march 
and counter-march up and down that hill, around 
those sharp corners, for upwards of two hours. 
And always the commissary 'buses, that still blaz- 
oned on their sides in huge letters the commerce 
of London, mingled with the army of civilian 
motors, carts, carriages, in streaming flight, among 
the dumbfounded population that had no means to 
escape. 

I rode up the hill to the police, to get permission 
to leave town by bicycle instead of train. The 
prefect was talking excitedly under his gothic 
arches, and waved me away with a hand before I 
could open my passport. Coasting down, a 
motor-cyclist buzzed past, mouth open in his un- 
seeing, ashen face. Bandaged troopers, their 
horses killed, limped along the sidewalks like men 
walking in their sleep. Whenever a motor-lorry 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 39 

paused, its driver promptly fell into a doze; all 
the extra men on the artillery and supply wagons 
slept through the jolting over pavements. High- 
landers, grimed with soil, stockings around their 
ankles, tartans gone, halted and scraped along their 
weary, blistered feet. War — this indeed was 
war in all its stupefying desperation. 

At nine o'clock I took the Paris road, first lead- 
ing almost straight west from St. Quentin to the 
village of Ham, fifteen miles beyond. As it hap- 
pened, that was the whole front of this section of 
the English force, and I rode completely along it, 
ranged for battle. Just out of town the infantry 
was breaking camp, and the carcasses of their beef 
ration lay everywhere in the road. To right and 
left of it, deployed cavalry or artillery, making 
for the cover of groves or swells in the flattish, 
fertile country. And always the surging back and 
forth of lightning motors, of motor-scouts — 
though I never again met Walker; the lumbering 
of London 'buses, only one of which I saw wrecked 
on its side. But in places bread and biscuits, 
fragments of army documents, were mashed 
and ground into the macadam where there had 
been a spill. Between all, the refugees afoot, on 
wheels, the trundling baby-carriage army, picked 
a hesitating way, I clinging closely to them for 
concealment whenever the markings of an officer 
were visible. 



40 FIVE FRONTS 

" I cawn't find those two ration carts," drawled 
one to another, as if he had no more than lost his 
hat. " Men dead and well out of the game, I 
fancy." 

I gave cigarettes to four infantrymen, just when 
they were deciding that their company had been 
wiped out. They had been looking for and failed 
to find it since dawn. " Better report at 'Am — 
ain't that the place we've orders for? — to the G 
division." It was a lowering day, beginning to 
rain, and I stopped for bread and cheese in a vil- 
lage drinking place, midway to Ham. Here were 
to be heard the same stories as at Le Cateau after 
the Mons fight; of the pathetic, generous hospi- 
tality given by the French peasants; of the awful 
decimations, always mentioned as though no more 
than the score of a football game ; of the Germans' 
poor rifle aim, their flinching at bayonets, efficient 
and hidden artillery, their prodigal advancing in 
massed formation — eight deep usually — and 
overpowering by sheer force of numbers; the as- 
surance of their greater losses; also the revolting 
charges. 

But in that cafe, even from those privates, I got 
the same uneasy glances, heard the same whispers 
after I had answered their questions. One fel- 
low, who had remarked heartily: " It's good to 
hear your own language in a furreign country," ab- 
ruptly grew silent at my story. Still, I thanked 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 41 

fortune that it was the English I had fallen in 
with and not the French. Their officers were too 
preoccupied in a strange country even to notice 
fully an obvious alien; with the latter it would 
have been different, and I should probably have 
long ago been brought to book. In the narrow 
streets of Ham, jammed with supply trucks, I 
finally turned south, for the twenty miles to No- 
yon. For the first time, spaces of that long road 
were free from the freight and humanity of bat- 
tle. Toward noon, the artillery detonations 
broke out behind, but they continued weak com- 
pared with the thunder of yesterday, and it seems 
now that I missed no real battle yesterday (Thurs- 
day, the 27). Hills appeared to the left, well fit 
for a defending army, and in that direction was 
La Fere, strongly fortified; to the west heights 
rose out of the deepening valley of the Oise. I 
rode through deserted towns. In one large vil- 
lage not a soul but two old women was to be 
seen. 

A rod outside Noyon was a glut of troops and 
transports. In the middle of the road, surrounded 
by staff officers, and more French than I had yet 
seen, was an elderly general. I should have 
known him as Sir John French, even if the cavalry- 
man by whom I was riding had not just mentioned 
that to his companion. He seemed a bit stouter 
than his pictures, but in the glimpse I had, as I 



42 FIVE FRONTS 

warily carried my bike through a sugar-beet patch, 
around that headquarters in the field, he was 
smiling, unworn, unruffled, to an elderly ally in 
pale blue. 

In Noyon the police commissariat was closed. 
I sought a cafe and drank a grenadine, after find- 
ing that a train would leave at five o'clock. But 
soon a reflection and an incident sent me forward, 
on the thirty-mile run to Compiegne. The town 
was too full of French staff officers. I was pay- 
ing my bill, just as a line of wagons started back in 
clattering retreat through the steep town. In the 
great forest of Compiegne, I was at last outside the 
lines, though still in the military area, and for the 
first time breathed freely. After those scenes of 
war, a great loneliness filled me in that vacant, 
man-sapped region. I stopped at a woodcutter's 
hut and drank cider. The man had colourless 
hair, was probably consumptive; his wife was 
working with nimble fingers, binding bristles into 
a white celluloid hairbrush. Fighting to them was 
as far away as Asia. Only outside Compiegne, 
toward five, I met a French private awheel, with 
rifle over his shoulder, who said he had been rid- 
ing since last night from Namur. He asked me 
into an inn for dinner, but I wisely said I was not 
hungry. 

In Compiegne, I got a bath and dinner at the 
Hotel de la Cloche, which was alive with Red 



ST. QUENTIN AND AFTERMATH 43 

Cross nurses. The night train for Paris, bringing 
in wounded to their steaming soup-kettles on the 
platform, was hours late. But on it were two 
English sergeants, in charge of the supply trains 
from the British base at Havre. Usually they 
went there by Amiens, but now the French had 
blown up the railroad. And the Uhlans were in 
St. Quentin — of course. I should have been, had 
I not been arrested, and bought that $38 wheel. 

We rode in a freight car, filled with young 
French volunteers under age, who never ceased to 
sing in their enthusiasm : 

C'est Guillaum-e, c'est Guillaum-e, 
C'est Guillaume que nous combattrons — 
Ah-h-h! . . . O-Ou! 

I reached the Gare du Nord at two o'clock this 
morning. 



IV 



THE TURNING TIDE — BATTLE OF THE MARNE 

Paris, September 16, 19 14. — Penetrating the 
Allies' lines during the recent and pivotal battle 
of the Marne proved a far harder and less suc- 
cessful venture than mingling with the British 
forces in the desperate days of the battle of Cam- 
brai. Again chance threw me among them 
rather than the French, to find their spirit in vic- 
tory at the staff headquarters in Coulommiers no 
less calm and generous than it had been in the 
tragic retreat upon St. Quentin. 

I failed to reach the firing-line; yet travelled that 
section furthest within France which the Germans 
have swept, where, in villages burned by their 
cavalry, towns looted, the meaning of war to the 
stoic French peasant was written enragingly large. 
This time arrest came from the military rather 
than the civil authorities — that arrest which 
seems to be the normal state of reporters who 
would follow this war into the forbidden " zone of 
the armies "; and I have just returned from a five- 
day sentence, whose quaintness only the ingenious 
Latin mind could have designed. 

For reporters to write of themselves heretofore 

44 



THE TURNING TIDE 45 

has been in bad taste and vain; but in this conflict 
which seems to mark their end on the battlefield, 
some note of their dilemmas, if only for a touch 
of relieving comedy, can be justified. " The story 
of this war can't be written for two or three 
years," said a captain of Cameron Highlanders 
to me in his mess in the Hotel Porcepic, Coulom- 
miers; adding grimly, "And then no one who 
could write it may be alive." 

For example, in order for us to reach the 
"front" last Wednesday (September 9) at the 
height of the Marne battle, a ruse was imperative. 
No trains were running eastward; a motor-car 
was necessary, for which you must have permis- 
sion from the police to leave the city, stating your 
destination. Of course, none would be given for 
the desired direction, or for any point, without a 
serious excuse. We decided on a doctor's certifi- 
cate, which finally was furnished by a sly-eyed old 
medico with a taste for the drama of intrigue 
(Heaven help his ilk with our County Medical 
Society!) in the southern purlieus of Paris. 

I suffered from angina pectoris, and with a 
nurse and doctor must go to a southern climate. 
Nice was stated; and when the next morning we 
passed out of the Vincennes Gate, among trenches, 
barricades, prone trees with all their branches 
whittled sharp — our chauffeur held under a 
thumb on his steering-wheel the yellow police pass 



46 FIVE FRONTS 

granting a fairway, but to the south. The plan 
was to ride thither as far as Melun, which a stray 
French bicycle scout on the boulevards had said 
the Allies had evacuated on Saturday; then, hiding 
our maps under the seats, turn north and east to- 
wards La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, with the story that 
the military had checked our route, or we had lost 
our way, if any of the red-trousered sentries at 
every bridge or railway crossing disputed us. 

At first the plan worked perfectly. Barred 
from entering the forest of Vincennes, we passed 
through Corbeil, which, because of its great flour 
mills, had been a German objective; then Melun, 
which showed no sign either of desertion or of oc- 
cupation by the enemy. At last, taking a straight 
road northeast between tall flanking poplars, 
across the fenceless, deserted landscape of lucerne 
and buckwheat, we struck the path of the sword. 

In the car we were abolishing militarism, con- 
ceiving a post-bellum millennium of working-folk 
and paupered money-lenders, when one of us ex- 
claimed, pointing — " German shell ! " Two 
round holes pierced the high garden wall of a 
house in that fleeting village ; and not till when well 
past did we realise that on neither curb nor door- 
step was to be seen a single human being. Then 
down a hill, by the green circus tents of hangars, 
with a Bleriot roosting in a wheatfield, we entered 
burned Courtesan. 



THE TURNING TIDE 47 

A dead bay horse by the roadside, his legs un- 
naturally elevated; the stifling tang of burnt hay, 
met us. Of that hamlet little stood except high- 
gabled walls of grey stone, around the charred 
wreck of homes. The Uhlans had fired even the 
barns, to destroy the crops and fodder, of folk 
whom nothing but a geographic line, the mill- 
stone of history, and a military caste separated 
them from as brothers. Gleams of flame still 
showed in the feathery embers. A crowd of peas- 
ant women — not a man among them — sur- 
rounded and stopped our car. 

They wore men's broad-brimmed straw hats, 
and their eyes were red from lack of sleep and 
weeping. Hardly one could have been under 
sixty. They kept their hands moving furtively 
under their worn cotton aprons, and talked all to- 
gether in pitiful ejaculations, as though having lost 
the power of coherent speech. They described 
the grey horsemen galloping to their doors, rifling 
and firing within, dragging them outside, slaught- 
ering their cattle, passing on, that Lord's day, in 
the smoke and flame. 

They kept reverting to this inhumanity : A son 
of the village, about twenty years old, had been led 
into a field with hands tied, and shot. 

"Why?" we demanded. 

" He had nineteen years," one answered. " He 
must soon be in the army. They would not want 



4 3 FIVE FRONTS 

that." It was not hard to tell which peasant was 
his mother. Behind the group a poor creature 
sobbed continually. 

Where were the other young men, the girls es- 
pecially? "They will return," we were told, 
" with the children. Things are better now." 
Here was the last chaper of the story that I had 
seen in the Nord, at Le Cateau and Busigny. 
Here, too, trudging behind little carts, the children 
carrying their pets, the parents with their all 
jammed into pillow-slips, had taken place that 
same exodus. They would return, yes, but to 
what, what ecstatic a salvation! An old man 
across the road was hammering at the iron tire of 
a wagon-wheel. His house and barn and horse 
were burned, but he s'till had the vehicle. And as 
we sped on toward the larger town of Rozoy, fires 
set around dead horses, dozens of which lay along 
the ditches as if struck down by pestilence, were 
burning, tended by old men in all the fields. But 
of the human graves there was no sign. 

At Rozoy began the touch of comedy that was 
to relieve the horrors of our coming sentence. 
One must remember that in this unspeakable war 
on France, fought as if in a well-groomed park, 
in a land and by peoples which still wear badges of 
medievalism amazing to Americans, the grim and 
the grotesque are sure to mingle. We were sit- 



THE TURNING TIDE 49 

ting at dejeuner in an inn, when there entered first 
a bronzed British captain with a small moustache, 
then a red-capped staff-officer, a Sir Someone Cun- 
ningham, it soon seemed. Next, the doorway 
filled magnificently with a civilian. His white 
goatee and moustache a la mousqaetaire at once 
conjured Louis Napoleon. Yet he was English 
— of the English. With a finger on his eye- 
glasses, he glared at us, to announce: 

" I am the Times correspondent, and will be 
shot at sunrise. But as for that frog-faced 
blighter — " he shook a finger at the captain, who 
grinned back deliriously " — death cannot settle 
my score with you." He sank into a chair, dra- 
matically quoting, " Unwept, unhonoured, and un- 
sung," and demanded white wine with his lunch- 
eon. 

There followed him the Dally Mail, in the per- 
son of a slim, whimsical young man who smelt of 
brilliantine; and the Mirror, as a fresh faced ex- 
artillery officer with a gift for telling stories in the 
Lancashire dialect. Their automobile comman- 
deered, arrested the night before for emerging 
from behind a haystack and answering in English 
the bad French of some staff officers of the Sec- 
ond Army who had lost their way, they had 
since been white elephants on the hands 
of the captain, who, because general headquarters 



So FIVE FRONTS 

was now moving from Melun to Coulommiers, 
was endeavouring to get them there in a hired 
machine. 

iWe made friends. The two officers, with the 
tact of all military men who have no specific 
orders about you, refrained from questioning us. 
But the prisoners foretold our gloomy fate if 
" caught " ; while Sir Cunningham, complaining 
that yesterday's cannonading had made him deaf, 
listened with a hand behind one ear, and the look 
of a cat that has swallowed a canary. We talked 
of Eastern wars, of political crises in Teheran, 
Vienna. There was not a statesman in the world 
whose most intimate friend Mr. Times commis- 
sioner had not been ; not a " war correspondent " in 
the days when they existed whom he had not fol- 
lowed to the grave; not a general in the French 
army who had not entertained him at dinner. 
And at moments he would lapse into the mutter 
— " Parliament shall hear of this. A question will 
be asked next Monday. Yes, we are travelling in 
a Black Maria, or, by the French idiom, a ' salad 
basket' " 

Thus, until there breezed in a jaunty being 
whose simple aspect completely stole his fire; a 
pink young lieutenant of Scotch Horse, Baron 
Russell, by name, of the Intelligence Department, 
an exact replica in dress, even to the eyeglass, of 
a certain Scotch comedian. He began by airily 



THE TURNING TIDE 51 

telling us of four chums of his who had all been 
killed along the Marne that morning, and when 
we exchanged cards and left town unchallenged in 
our car, declared that when I saw him after the 
war at his club in Piccadilly he would have the Vic- 
toria Cross. Positively no doubt about it. 

All this, understand, I detail with a purpose, 
quite aware of how on the edge of the most wanton 
carnage in history it may sound trivial. But if 
telling the truth about war will end it, it must be 
the complete truth; and here and to come was the 
spirit of the English winning, on the rebound from 
their martyrdom at St. Quentin, as I have written. 
That afternoon we tried by devious roads to reach 
La Ferte, being finally stopped by an endless 
French supply train headed there, to pass which 
meant sure arrest. So we headed north, and ran 
into the first British outpost on a side road near 
La Haute Maison, five miles from the firing line. 
The usual lorries and London motor-'buses lined 
the way, and the Irish sergeant, who sent for the 
lieutenant who " advised " us to retreat to Crecy, 
declared he had been born in Boston. I had re- 
marked it in the Nord, how the eyes of Mr. Atkins 
always brightened, and he often informed you that 
he was going to New York " after the war is 
over," when shown an American passport. But 
coincidence began to grow uncanny. Two bicycle 
scouts hove to, one who averred he had been raised 



52 FIVE FRONTS 

in Portland, Oregon, and the other in Ohio. 

Yet Crecy received us without suspicion. We 
sent the car back to Paris, one of our trio still in 
it, while Reed and I resolved to try our luck on 
foot in the morning. It was not the Crecy of Ed- 
ward III, but one Tommy of an ammunition train 
camped in front of the mairie made a remark that 
should be as memorable as Edward's message to 
the Black Prince. In the crowd of them that sur- 
rounded us, offering a hidden berth in a lorrie for 
the front at daylight — detailing the incessant 
tale of German brutalities, of a German cavalry 
force cut off and surrounded in a wood by the 
Marne, where they had blown up a bridge before 
the whole column had passed it — one Atkins, 
calling to another, summed his history of the war 
with : 

" And the Rooshians'll be in Berlin next week." 

" Berlin? 'Ow can they? " retorted a corporal. 
" I tell you they 'aven't crossed the Pyrenees yet." 

" Well, if they've got it as smooth as we 'ave 
now," put in a third, " that won't stop them. Bet- 
ter than a 20-guinea Cook's tour, this war is for 
our fellers here." 

A French woman in black, however, with a hat 
of the boulevards, who stopped to inquire of us 
where the absent mayor was, did not share their 
opinion of the town. She had come out to see a 
son at the front, been assured of his safety, and 



THE TURNING TIDE S3 

wanted Paris again, quickly, train or no train. 

" This place — this place," she raised her shoul- 
ders. " Life does not exist here. Even in time 
of peace it is 400 kilometres from anywhere. 
Even the Prussians have not bothered to pass it 
through." True enough; perhaps it was she who 
had scared the mayor away. At any rate, he had 
fled, and he seemed to be in general demand that 
evening. But our estimate of his courage was 
rather replaced by respect for other attainments, 
as implied by his next caller. A youth with stoop- 
ing shoulders could not be denied him. In a 
house across the bridge over the Grand Morin, an 
addition to the population of Crecy was imminent. 
Who ever said that there is no hope for France? 

In his Honour's absence, the sauf-conduit we 
wanted to the front, then near Pierre-levee, had to 
be secured from the Police Commissariat — a civil 
document, strictly valueless, as we knew, within the 
lines, though it might work with French sentries. 
And it was no fault of that personage, the good 
Monsieur Chargot, that we did not get there. 
Never, except in musical comedy, have I met his 
like, from the medals and gilt and silver braid that 
covered his chest and limbs to the dramatic fer- 
vour with which he scanned our papers, slapped us 
each on the back, and stamped the documents we 
needed in his office. He must see us to our hotel. 
We must guess his age. We had to admire how 



54 FIVE FRONTS 

strong he was, feel his arms, which were pipe- 
stems; hear the gaunt hero of '70 boast, " I am the 
strongest man in France; I am her champion ath- 
lete at fencing, the golf, yes, and the football." 

You see, the marauders had withdrawn; chil- 
dren were being born; every wind was favourable. 

At dinner in the inn, as a crew of Tommies en- 
tertained their officers at the piano with the 
" Marseillaise " and " God Save the King," not a 
devious word or look was directed at us. A tall 
lieutenant observed, " If you want to catch a 
Uhlan, they're so hungry, just go into the woods 
north of here and hold out a biscuit." 

It wasn't until three English newspaper photog- 
raphers reached Crecy well after dark that the luck 
shifted. Two reporters M. Chargot might abide, 
but three more than that roused in him all the spy- 
madness of the French peasant. He clamoured 
into the dining-room for Reed and me to vouch for 
and identify the intruders. Naturally we could 
not. " They look like Germans," declared the 
commissary. And out in the courtyard, where 
they were dining by a single candle under a mag- 
nolia, their spectacled, sallow faces bore him out. 
Moreover, a certain Captain Greave, of the sup- 
ply train, who had been jolly enough at dinner, 
stole out into the dark garden to get a line on 
them. They talked " at " him with most convinc- 



THE TURNING TIDE 55 

ing, tactless arguments on the idle persecution of 
reporters, which only ended by the Captain's lump- 
ing us all five together, and his threat that we had 
better make ourselves scarce in the morning or 
take consequences. The clear implication was 
that he would notify the staff about us. 

All night the tortuous cobbles of Crecy clattered 
under horsemen and lorries. In a lull toward 
dawn an officer pounded on the hotel door, and 
after a dialogue in execrable French with some 
sleepy lady, aroused officers in the room below us. 
" Complete defeat! " he shouted up to their win- 
dow dramatically in the ashen stillness. That, we 
learned after breakfast, was of the force sur- 
rounded in the wood that we had heard of, where 
1,500 prisoners and 12 guns were taken. And 
the British van had crossed the Marne at five 
o'clock that morning. 

We consulted. Afoot, it would be impossible 
to catch the front; indeed, in this war, one's only 
way to see fighting is to have retreating lines close 
around you, as had happened at Le Cateau. We 
flipped a coin; heads for Pierre-levee, tails for 
Coulommiers, to take the bull by the horns, state 
our case and wishes frankly to the staff, and chance 
their indulgence. Tails fell twice, and we climbed 
into the motor of the two lieutenants who had 
been so friendly at dinner, and burned the twelve 



$6 FIVE FRONTS 

odoriferous kilometres — battlefield details un- 
necessary — toward the headquarters town, which 
gives its name to a superior brand of cheese, and 
the Grand Morin bisects with arched bridges, old 
balconied houses and weeping willows. 



COMEDY AT THE BRITISH HEADQUARTERS 

The Prussians had been there, looting but not 
burning. Every unshuttered door and window 
was smashed, chalked with the invariable legend 
— why was a mystery — " Eintritt verboten." 
Khakied Tommies, bare-kneed Scotsmen boiling 
hams over campfires, lordlings dozing in huge 
grey cars, motorcycles cutting corners, " Red 
Caps " (staff officers) gesticulating at French in- 
terpreters with the costumes and paunches of 
chorusmen, swarmed in the streets, in the square 
between the Municipal Theatre and the Hotel de 
Ville. As we sought the Provost Marshal in the 
latter, there loomed up Louis Napoleon (he of 
the Times), at the instant of oracularly confiding 
to some titled major — " Yes, I had a rawther 
high opinion of the Kaiser, until lately." 

The Provost Marshal rejoiced in the name of 
Bunbury, an old colonel with a kindly, indefinite 
eye and very long cheeks where the bones pro- 
truded in their exact centre. He seemed to ex- 
pect us, waved aside any verbal plea with the re- 
quest that we explain our purposes and presence 
in writing at once. I commandeered a typewriter 

57 



58 FIVE FRONTS 

in the back of his office, and wrote on a jury-box 
sort of bench, for the room had been the court of 
the justice of the peace. Immediately he put us 
under parole. 

" Are we arrested? " we asked. 

" Oh, no," grinned he. " But you must give 
me your word not to leave Coulommiers." Our 
denial that we had ever seen an official statement 
barring reporters from the lines mildly piqued 
him. 

" What'll we get? " we asked. " Two years in 
a French fortress? " That had been the expected 
verdict of our confreres at Rozoy. 

" Perhaps." And he referred us upstairs, in 
that chilly pile, wired with the rubber conduits of 
a field electric-lighting kit, to a Major Kirke, of 
the Intelligence Department. After another 
hour's wait, we found him more sympathetic and 
no less confiding — a fellow with a blue eye and 
small red moustache. 

" We have sent to Paris to settle your case," 
said he. " In the meantime, you have permission 
to draw rations to-day — and to-morrow, prob- 
ably." 

At any rate, life for twenty-four hours in Cou- 
lommiers still lay before us. Arrested? Oh, 
dear no ! And since, I have found nothing to re- 
gret in that time. Strange as it may sound, we had 
not the least resentment against our hosts, while 



COMEDY AT HEADQUARTERS 59 

they, once the machine of discipline was cranked, 
all treated us with that friendly, casual candour in 
which the Briton of caste is natural master. How 
could one grudge freedom to talk and wander at 
will in the heart and flower of the British army, 
winning now, on the offensive — not crushed, deci- 
mated but still blindly valiant, as I had seen it in 
the valley of the Oise? 

A time, indeed, of extraordinary revelations. 
Whole divisions might be enfiladed, but that 
seemed nothing to the tragedy that nowhere in 
Coulommiers could a fellow get four o'clock tea. 
Tommy, whom we gathered had a special fleet of 
lorries to supply him with the leaf, was inclined to 
worry more about them than the range of shrap- 
nel. Monocles over khaki; " I say, Sir Lionel," 
and, " Oh, Westminster," were thick in that 
square and City Hall. A private party — no 
other word fits — who resembled a white hope in 
a skirt, was tacking a label on a box: "To be 
called for by Lord Locke." But the amazing 
thing was the lack of formality between men and 
officers, of the chill and cringing in what one im- 
agines is discipline. It existed, rigid, and efficient, 
else the pervading air of smoothness could not 
have been. Officers consulted their men casually 
in giving orders, and the men would accost them 
with no more than a dab of the hand at a cap. 
Visible discipline is sometimes held to be mild in 



6o FIVE FRONTS 

our American navy; but these Lords and cockneys 
saving Europe — perhaps all liberty — were just 
one cheerful, hard-working family, making the 
best of their job, far more informally than our 
fleet does at target-practice. Social caste there 
may be in England, but England in the field is 
without the first taint of militarism. You see at 
the top notch, sweeping all else aside, the race's 
genius for administration that has made its great 
history. 

And from Tommy in the cafes, sighing for ciga- 
rettes which the enemy had swept clean away; 
from MacGregor, chucking biscuits to girls wash- 
ing clothes in the river and giggling at his naked 
knees — you could not get one word of venom 
against the Teuton. " The blarsted simpleton," 
said one, of a prisoner he had taken, " just lay on 
his back in the motor, playing a mouth-organ, 
'appy as a king." 

"Expect their rifles to 'it us?" said another, 
who produced a kitten which he had carried all the 
way from Belgium tucked in his coat. " 'Ow can 
they, when they fire 'em from down by their knees 
— just like that?" 

Always I kept eyes peeled for curly sorrel hair, 
for Walker, my bike scout of the Le Cateau bat- 
tle. And once from the Grand Morin bridge I 
sighted him, scooting around a corner, but out of 



COMEDY AT HEADQUARTERS 61 

hail. Yet, alive still! If plain cats have nine 
lives, Cheshires have ninety. 

The blithe Baron Russell — he of the certain V. 
C. — took me inspecting his mounts, and on the 
way rather scotched one's faith in half the tales 
you hear of brutalities. One story told here and 
at Crecy, by men and officers alike, always con- 
sistent in detail, even to names and places, con- 
cerned a bicycle scout. Of three captured by 
Uhlans, two escaped and hid in a barn. They saw 
their comrade shot twice, bayonetted in the face, 
his body, while still alive, soaked with gasolene 
from the machine, and both thrown into a haystack 
which had been set afire. Yes, Russell had heard 
that; he was in the Intelligence Department, to 
which the bike scouts belonged, and he had investi- 
gated, thoroughly, to this effect: Not one motor- 
scout was missing, and none of the names men- 
tioned had ever belonged to the squad! 

" But I mustn't tell you all this, or be seen talk- 
ing to you. If they think you're a spy, what'll 
they'll think of me, eh?" and he screwed in his 
eyeglass. " Silly work mine. Translating pris- 
oners' letters all day. What do you think? 
Why, each mother's son of them says, ' By the 
time you get this, we'll be in Paris.' . . . Hello. 
Look at them. Firing squad." 

We were back in the square. Four men shoul- 



62 FIVE FRONTS 

dering rifles were leading off down the street two 
young soldiers with heads forward. They stum- 
bled, shuffled, but not an eye in the throngs seemed 
aware of them. I was glad, as they vanished over 
the bridge, that I had not seen their faces. 

"What for?" I asked. 

" Looting. Two this morning, too, and for 
rape. But we were speaking of spies. You said 
you were at Cateau? Well, we never catch 'em 
in time. They hang around headquarters. Re- 
member the church there? One was flying car- 
rier pigeons from the dome of it after we left, giv- 
ing away our position." 

At night it was the same in the Hotel Pore- 
epic; whither peasants with eggs and veal from the 
country were daring to return; whither cavalry 
captains from the front, scouts who had not eaten 
for two days, dropped in for food, sleep, and the 
wine of the country, served by the fair Alice. 
Tales of strategy, carnage, heroism, in all the long 
fight from Mons — to date maybe the most heroic 
in history — you had for the asking; but not one 
that carried a syllable of drama, of fervour, of 
hate or pity, in those quiet islanders' voices. It 
may sound impossible; it may not seem human, in 
the abhorred name of this war as a distant world 
views it — but it is the truth. It does justice to 
the professional soldier, in defence of the world. 

We were told our fate in the morning. At 



COMEDY AT HEADQUARTERS 63 

turnlng-in the night before, " Louis " of the Times 
had drawn me mysteriously aside. Whether it 
was the white wine, or because our captors on their 
receipt for his commandeered car had cut 200 
sovereigns from his valuation, he had whispered: 
" I have it direct through General Smith-Dor- 
rien " — or words to such effect — " whom I 
brought up from a boy, in Egypt. Don't — don't 
tell the youngsters." (He meant the whimsical 
Daily Mail man, and the ex-soldier of the Mir- 
ror.) He gave me his wife's address in England. 
" You, as Americans," he ended, feelingly, " may 
fare better. But already, as organiser of the 
Times forces in this war, I have been criticised on 
the floor of the House. We shall get three years 
in the Cherche-Midi." 

It turned out to be not quite so bad as that; 
only exile to the south. In the morning, rumour 
first had it that a two-horse rig was at our disposal, 
in which we were to start on a gipsy tour, telling 
fortunes and weaving baskets as far as the repub- 
lic of Andorra. But toward noon, Colonel Bun- 
bury of the cheek-bones turned us over to the Na- 
tional Gendarmerie. A sallow army lieutenant 
with a hooked nose who received us found pleas- 
ure in executing a pantomime of guillotining at our 
expense. Inside the brigade building the com- 
mandant, in riding breeches — he was too fat even 
to have sat a farm Percheron — made out for each 



64 FIVE FRONTS 

of us a dossier, which stated among other things : 
" He is not dangerous, . . . will proceed from 
brigade to brigade as far as Tours, where he will 
be released." 

" How many of your brigade stations," we 
asked, " are there between here and Tours? " 

With a chuckle the fellow held up fifteen fingers. 
" It will take you about a week," he said, and pro- 
ceeded, with the pose of a pen-and-ink artist, to 
enliven each dossier in turn with a description of 
his victim. They lose piquancy in translation, 
especially " Louis's " moustache mousquetaire; the 
Daily Mail man's*, which was naissante and his 
nose cave; also Reed's front placide, and my 
menton proeminent. Can you beat it all? 

A train of German wounded and prisoners, 
which steamed into the railroad station in a cloud 
of iodoform, started us south, chaperoned by two 
gendarmes, that afternoon; and our last glimpse 
of Coulommiers, in the heart of the cheese coun- 
try, was a perfect symbol of the Briton in France : 
a Highlander with a loaf of bread like a baseball 
bat under his arm on the vain search for a tea- 
room. The prisoners, with a " pantalon rouge " 
and bayonet at the door of each horse van, we 
were not allowed to talk to; but their queer grey 
uniforms, square Teuton heads, month's beards, 
and the cowed resignation of their dull blue eyes 
were eloquent enough. 



COMEDY AT HEADQUARTERS 6$ 

As a fact, before reaching Tours, we reported 
at but three brigades. In Gretz that night, which 
we reached on the straw and manure of a cattle 
car, we were greeted in the deserted streets by the 
shout, " Marie, des fous! " from two girls behind 
a hedge. From a filthy inn under the walls of 
Baron Rothschild's chateau, our next sentries took 
us to Champigny in that noble's luggage truck 
— a veritable salad basket in the eyes of all the 
countryside, and of the French soldiers at each 
barricade along the road. The Champigny gen- 
tlemen, using us as an excuse to see the sights 
of Paris, just relieved from its desperate resigna- 
tion, took us straight to the capital; and we had 
the thrill of dashing through the gates of the In- 
valides in two taxis, to the joy of an officer from 
our cruiser Tennessee, who knew me too well, and 
was strolling by. 

An official of the military government of the 
capital parolled us to take the train to Tours next 
day. He remarked that the cathedral there is a 
masterpiece of the Renaissance. We found it 
quite so. 



PART II 
WITH THE AUSTRIANS IN GALICIA 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 

Neu Sandec, Galicia (Austrian Poland), 
October 18. — The Imperial Austrian colours are 
yellow and black, and I wear a brassard of them, 
exactly like a Princeton hat-band, around my left 
arm. This, at least, is something in such a press- 
forbidden war; and it is a bit more, perhaps, to be 
the only English-speaking person with the Aus- 
trian Army yet arrayed so, and have the promise 
of seeing on the firing-line what is the matter with 
the famous Russian " steam-roller " of which one 
read so much last month in Paris. It seems stuck 
the other side of nearby, unpronounceable Przem- 
ysl. 

To attain this in Vienna was a matter of carry- 
ing letters from one official " hochwohlgeboren " 
to another. Incidentally, in that city no one was 
eating animals from the zoo, one heller bought 
just as much beer as ever, the Cafe Sacher was 
crowded, and the white-jacketed man from San 
Francisco behind the Savoy bar produced hot 
tamales at midnight, as a matter of course. 

And, quite sincerely, the writer has never found 
the polite professions of foreign military men 

69 



7 o FIVE FRONTS 

more quickly substantiated, generously and uncon- 
ditionally, than by the said hoch-et-ceteras. 
" You will have no expenses whatever while with 
the army," declared the final oracle in the Georg- 
kochplatz, " except to open champagne when we 
win our victories." 

Perhaps there is a nigger in the woodpile lying 
low for pen sympathy in all this. I hope not. In 
the end, it would only make the truth more easy 
and diverting to write. Probably I am over-sus- 
picious, from having lingered too long in Paris. 

This town at present is the Austrian army head- 
quarters. To have been, as I now have, at the re- 
spective bases of two armies in the field — and ene- 
mies, at that — should offer active contrasts; but 
the fact is, the heel of war stamps Noyon or 
Coulommiers among the warm vineyards of 
France, and these cold cabbage fields bordering 
the Russian plain with much the same human im- 
ages. 

Yonder in those great sandstone barracks — 
like new city apartment houses — is the royal 
Karl Franz, who succeeded the Sarajevo " mar- 
tyr " ; also the executive head of the dual empire's 
forces, General von Hotzendorff. But you do 
not see them, as with the English at Coulommiers, 
mingling with troopers and populace; you do not 
hear the Hapsburg Archduke Frederick, also here, 
the commander-in-chief, greeted, " Sagen Sie, 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 71 

Fred," by fellow officers with the same casualness 
as the British Duke there enjoyed. But Tommy, 
in kilt and khaki, at a tourist saunter in France, or 
boiling beef over a campfire on the cobbles, had 
the same detached, unworried air as has his cousin 
Otto all in baggy blue-grey, with a high-fronted 
little round cap, as he strolls the Ulica Krakov- 
ska here, or in the outlying fields ladles soup from 
his wheeled kitchen. 

Both countries found army and populace 
racially alien to one another; in each the incurious 
tolerance of the people towards their saviour from 
invasion has been amazing. Trade goes on in 
the " rynek " (marketplace), crowded with little 
straw-filled peasants' carts; long-coated Jews, with 
the two orthodox curls before their ears, gesticu- 
late and haggle with a mother fitting a new cap on 
her sturdy youngster from the hills, as avidly as 
though no Cossack could ever wreck their stock. 
A priest with a pompom on his square-cornered hat 
clatters past in the seediest of barouches, and down 
on the filthy cobbles, with a mediaeval fervour 
quite in keeping with modern war, kneel before 
him all the shawled Christian women in sight. 
Perhaps between them thunders some huge war- 
coloured motor-lorrie filled with bread or ammuni- 
tion — trucks which claim in huge letters a 
brewery in Budapest, just as in France they adver- 
tised some English soap. And each moment grey 



72 FIVE FRONTS 

motor-cars, with a thin lateral girder rigged over- 
head to raise wire entanglements at night, chug 
and plunge through streets far too narrow and 
winding for them; only here the British flat caps 
and khaki of officers are replaced by blue-grey flan- 
nel, but with gold, scarlet, or orange splashes on 
the collars, and already stoles of fur. You miss 
only the motor-cycle scouts of this petrol war. 
Polish roads are as bad as our own. 

To get here was a railroad journey of forty- 
eight hours, made in six in times of peace, with 
sleep impossible and food elusive. But in the sta- 
tions were the same steaming cauldrons of Red 
Cross soup as in France, presided over by young 
women also no less conscious of their costumes 
than of their responsibilities. But not their 
favour for the ever-suspected foreigner; and I 
still carry the blight of two dawn breakfasts in 
the unutterably filthy inns of places like Dsiedsitz 
and Zywiec. 

At last, across the Silesian border, the Car- 
pathians rose southward, snow from the last three 
days' fall still whitening the high pine clearings. 
Northward, thirty miles to the Russian border, 
lay a rolling, Appalachian-like land of larch, and 
birch golden with autumn. Instead of fence, 
there were hedges of clipped spruce; log houses 
chinked with moss and clay; barefooted women 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 73 

gathering their crops of cabbages in the freezing 
muck of fields. 

At each station, hordes of refugees, now that 
the Russians are in retreat, crowded on and off 
the pottering train, returning to their homes. 
The shawled heads, bundles, the polyglot tongues 
and headlong, bewildered pace matched exactly 
those of our immigrant crowds landing at the 
Battery. It made one feel at home; far more 
so than in homogeneous, self-sufficient France. 
Here were the ingredients of our own melting- 
pot, all as unaware of so likely a destiny as we 
are of the problems they will bring us after the 
war. 

Especially at night in northern Austria, you 
felt the spell of the war-god. In our peace-proud 
eyes, we have thought voluntary enlistments im- 
possible in nations like this of conscripts and mili- 
tary duty. Yet, apparently, the under-aged and 
the over throughout even this factional country 
are flocking without coercion to the colours. 
There is even a Polish Legion, moved, of course, 
by hate of the persecuting Slav. In the dark- 
ness you saw on the hats of youths running up 
and down the platforms the glittering gilt and 
silver, like Christmas-tree tinsel, with which every 
volunteer in Austria decks himself before receiv- 
ing his uniform and orders. Bohemians, Mora- 



74 FIVE FRONTS 

vians in red waistcoats and brass buttons, they 
raced about shouting with that peculiar vigour 
of the German or Germanized peasantry, which 
it would be the arch calamity of this world war to 
see crushed utterly; and each as he ran sang 
snatches of some haunting, plaintive battle-song. 

In the jammed second class carriage I shared 
seats with two young infantry officers from Vienna, 
who up to now had done only a year's service, and 
also were bound for the front. 

" You ought to see the fierce spirit of my men," 
said the one with the big nose, who had lived a 
year in England. " And they come from all over 
Austria-Hungary." He spoke with a real fer- 
vour, but insisted, too, that he was not a " pro- 
fessional soldier," which, perhaps, accounted for 
his belligerency, after I had hinted a doubt of 
the genuineness of a common patriotism in this 
land. 

Only hinted, because in this war, where the 
truth lies so deep, behind so many veils of preju- 
dice and press-agenting that one begins to despair 
of its existence, direct questions are generally fool- 
ish, and may be dangerous. Had I asked why 
Hungarians and Austrians were quarrelling in 
the field (as one reads in France), they would 
have laughed with the same scorn that I, having 
up to now read English newspapers, have been 
tempted to voice at the cock-sure statements of 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 75 

their press that India and Egypt are mutinous 
against England. 

The lieutenant's companion kept taking off his 
hat and running a hand through his close-cropped, 
whitish hair. He was the true bullet-headed 
Teuton, with extraordinary high, wide cheek- 
bones and a tooth-brush moustache. He was 
very concerned that the rules of active service had 
so robbed him of his locks, and told me with the 
simple sentiment of his race how his " liebe " — 
best girl, supposedly — had clipped him when he 
left her that very morning. 

" We take these ignorant peasants," said the 
other, defending universal military duty, " and in 
a year of discipline have made men out of ani- 
mals — taught ignorant louts how to read and 
write." 

I didn't remind him that the sabre was not 
necessary for this, and that less money than a 
standing army absorbs, spent on State schools, 
would turn out even more polished gentlemen 
than the Austrian private. Fact is, the writer 
has always believed in compulsory service, but 
not on the grounds that Europe urges for it and 
that are so abhorrent to us. This war must pre- 
sent us with the problem of defence against the 
predatory commercialism really at the bottom 
of it. 

" We are not selfish in this war, we are not 



76 FIVE FRONTS 

fighting to enrich ourselves," went on this young 
man, " but only to assure the peace and prosperity 
of our future generations. . . . Yet it is a trade 
war, not a national or dynastic war, least of all 
a popular war. England seems to think she 
should rule the world because she can beat us at 
making haberdashery." 

A clever fellow. One must always bow to sin- 
cere idealism, which it never pays to argue with. 
His nose acquitted him. But I wonder how he 
will fight. 

We tried to sleep, our feet sprawling against 
one another's stomachs, heads on the knapsacks 
covered in cowhide with the hair on. Once the 
youngster of the " liebe " woke with a start, and 
answered the other's query of what ailed him — 
" I was wondering," said he, " whether this 
won't be my last railroad journey." And I ask, 
what man of a race other than this terrible, bru- 
tal Teutonic one, could have had the guileless sen- 
timentalism to think, or thinking, speak so, on his 
way to the firing-line ? 

The lights started to go out; but the royster- 
ing crowd of civilians all about us waxed noisier, 
as they began to munch cold goose and sausages, 
to pass about black bottles and tiny schnapp 
glasses. One Pole, rather the worse for these, 
had a long time been glaring darkly at me over his 
fierce moustachios. He demanded aggressively 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 77 

what language I was speaking. It took some 
time for my clever friend to appease and con- 
vince him that Americans also used the tongue of 
the perfidious English. His friends had agreed, 
he told us, that we were talking Swedish. Where- 
upon we all shared their queer drinks, mixing 
plum brandy and kiimmel in the little glasses. 

In the morning, stepping out into this town, it 
was as if the seat of war had been transported 
on a magic carpet to the region of Hester Street, 
New York. It is only a large village, with the 
sewage flowing through the middle of some 
streets, as in Mexico; but the buildings that closely 
line the main Ulica Krakovska, in their heavily 
lintelled windows and rococo cornices, are our 
East Side to a T. In a cafe I got breakfast from 
a returned emigrant who had been a waiter in 
Max Schwartz's Cafe Liberty, on Houston Street, 
and claimed the friendship of W. T. Jerome and 
Judge Kernochan. Back there, the veal and 
poultry on the way to be killed " kosher " is driven 
in cooped wagons; here, as I ate, I watched peas- 
ant women on the way to rynek hugging live 
geese under their cloaks, till one ran amuck with 
a splendiferous dragoon, in scarlet trousers, 
dragging sword, and golden frogs on his astrachan 
coat. Next, an old fellow in his stinking yellow 
sheep-skins driving a pig with a string tied to 
his hind leg down the local Grand Street, defi- 



7 8 FIVE FRONTS 

antly, perhaps. Last, the ominous clatter of 
hoofs, and here passes a company of Hussars re- 
turning from the battlefield, the men mud-smeared 
from their ashen faces to the yellow facings 
of their coats (red-facings for the few Hun- 
garians among them), the horses pitifully thin, 
many riderless, and with festering sores on their 
backs. 

But my pilgrimage from the hochwohlgeboren 
to hoch-ditto was not yet ended. Now in one 
office, where a pair of skis leaned in a corner, I 
was handed the aforesaid brassard from the 
drawer of a field kit. Outside another, an aged 
beggar sat moaning and beseeching on a heap of 
crushed stone. Twice, to maintain the mediaeval 
flavour, I was asked what my religion was. And 
finally landed, after a five-mile drive in an enor- 
mous sea-going hack, through seas of mud punc- 
tuated with gay roadside madonnas on stucco 
pedestals, to the mess of K. u. K. Kriegpresse- 
quartier Feldpostamt No. 39, in the " casino " of 
a poultry-ridden, unsanitary inn, where one's fel- 
low-guests include at least one Hungarian jour- 
nalist who used to be a trick bicycle rider — 
yes, at Hammerstein's, New York — and every 
one clicks his heels together and bows to the col- 
onel before sitting down to eat. And by after- 
noon I had had my chest jabbed with hypodermic 
and received five hundred million dead cholera 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 79 

germs as a prophylactic, for there are some four- 
teen cases here. 

Since, in the process of adapting one's self, you 
have as a neutral to reply tactfully to such with- 
ering questions as, " And what do you think of 
England now for plunging the world into this 
war?" To accept such eye-openers as the sol- 
emn statement (by a Hungarian) that all which 
is decent and worthy in the Russian comes through 
his Asiatic Tartar blood. 

One tries hard to understand. For instance, 
yesterday we were all to be taken to see a spy 
shot. He was a Ruthenian priest of the Greek 
Church. Ruthenians are Slavs, and their peas- 
antry scattered through the country are prone to 
help the invaders. It was to be a show execu- 
tion, to teach a moral lesson, but at the last mo- 
ment was called off. The culprit's conviction was 
changed to lese-majeste, and he was pardoned. 

The easy-going, generous refinement of the 
average Austrian is world-famous. At Vienna, 
in official quarters not to be mentioned, I was 
urged to " give these people a square deal, because 
they haven't had it yet." Well, there is the wife 
of a captain here, who, ever since the war began, 
has been trying to follow him to the front. Twice 
or thrice she has been sent back. She haunts the 
cafe of my East Side waiter, collects officers about 
her, pours out her yearnings and her troubles. 



So FIVE FRONTS 

They admit that she is a nuisance, that she has 
no business here; but they listen and sympathise 
with her by the hour. To my suggestion, with 
Lord Kitchener's warning to the English army in 
mind, that she be arrested, the answer is made, 
" Impossible, impossible, to treat a woman so. 
We are powerless." Again. Driving home the 
other evening, three young Polish girls in a road- 
side farm ran out shouting and hailing our car- 
riage. To my amazement, we stopped, and an 
officer got out to attend to them. They ran back 
giggling to the house : it was only a girl's imperti- 
nent fooling. But with the ideas one has been 
given of the Germans' treatment of peasantry, my 
heart was for a moment in my mouth. The offi- 
cer chased and caught one of the girls. It was 
rather dark — but I think I saw him kiss her. 

So in this war, no matter which army one is 
with, it is hard for a neutral not to feel in sym- 
pathy with the side that he is on. Necessarily 
then, you are too far from its exiguous coun- 
cils, from those single, inevitable brutalities of 
nation-wide firing-lines that loom so large as the 
horrors, truths, and deceptions of a neutral press 
— to be sophisticated by partisanship. One is 
confined to Neu Sandec, where it is impossible to 
buy a towel, and a shop that sells soap sticks out 
a sign to tell you. 

Sometimes we go camping in the Carpathian 



INTO THE CARPATHIANS 81 

foothills. There last Sunday we ran into a band 
of ten-year-olds, playing Cossack and Austrian, 
fighting a Buffalo Bill battle. They had wooden 
rifles, tiny knapsacks covered with cow-skin. All 
over Europe, I suppose, instead of tops or mar- 
bles, or whatever the seasonal games are, from 
Antivari to Dundee, the rising generation is play- 
ing at war. 

When it grows up, how will these days influ- 
ence its outlook upon life and the future? Those 
youngsters may then be the only men alive in their 
various fatherlands. 



II 

THE CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 

Przemysl, October 25-November 3. — Last 
evening while we skidded down the hill toward 
the River San, the flashes of Russian artillery 
fire twelve miles to the eastward pulsed through 
the night-mist like reddish heat lightning. Yet 
then, as we passed the sentries of the outer 
and the inner fortifications, where nothing was 
visible except great redoubts of sod and masses 
of wire entanglements, and received the " Feld- 
ruf " (password), you could hear no detona- 
tions; nor any throughout the night in this long- 
beleaguered Austrian stronghold. But certainly 
a battle was on. In the streets our headlights 
struck the blinking eyelids of endless files of grey 
infantry, trudging afield under their hairy knap- 
sacks; and toward midnight in the Cafe Stieber it 
was whispered that again the Russians were at- 
tempting to surround the city. 

To this place from the Austrian staff headquar- 
ters, as the crow flies, it is scarcely sixty miles, 
but by motor-cars and rail it took us three days 
and nights. As to mud and landscape, you might 
have been touring the Piedmont region of Vir- 

82 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 83 

ginia. The single-track railroad was blocked 
with returning hospital trains, trains of wounded, 
of Russian prisoners, Red Cross trains going for- 
ward; each with no less than two engines and two 
dozen cars. Remember, that for all one reads of 
France and Belgium, this eastern war theatre is 
by far the greater both in length of firing line and 
numbers engaged. The line extends from the 
Baltic Sea to Rumania, now that the German and 
Austrian armies are joined. Here three nations 
with some 6,000,000 men in arms face one an- 
other in unending battle. 

But a nearer marvel lies in the contrast, both 
human and military, between the war here and 
the war in the west; and in that difference there 
is a resemblance of significance for Americans. 
Yesterday as we pushed our car over the high 
divide between two forks of the San, no veteran 
of our War of the Secession could have stood 
among those yellowing birches and believed his 
eyes. Arms bandaged in slings, limping, bracing 
themselves with sticks, the wounded slipped and 
tottered down the hills — afoot, mind you, in 
muddy grey uniforms and high-fronted caps, al- 
most the exact colour and design of the South's. 
It was 1864, not 19 14. It was as if the years 
between had profited mankind nothing, the world 
had not moved since then. 

I have cited the likeness of a British to an 



8 4 FIVE FRONTS 

Austrian headquarters; but outside such a place 
you meet here the grim, labourious opposite to 
the swift gasolene war in France. Into the Neu 
Sandec railroad station, as we left it, rolled a train 
of wounded, of bearded creatures crowding the 
wide doors of luggage vans, staring from their 
swathings with the meek daze of the discarded 
conscript. The hind car was a passenger carriage. 
Two men in gloves, clad from head to foot in 
white rubber, stood on the platform. A stretcher 
was waiting outside the last compartment. Two 
soldiers were lugging a limp body from it, by the 
head and heels, as one does a dead man. He 
sank upon the canvas without a sound nor the 
tensing of one muscle. He was middle-aged, 
thinly bearded, his nose had once been broken, and 
his cheeks had a queer greenish pallor. A Red 
Cross man pushed through the hushed throng, his 
arms forward, unfolding a big square of paper. 
He slapped it upon the carriage with the same 
perfunctory deftness that a theatrical advance 
agent shows a bill-board. It read in great ver- 
milion letters: CHOLERA. 

That morning in my visit to General Conrad von 
Hotzendorf, who, so to speak, is the General Joffre 
of the Austrian army, he had given warning of 
the disease without — and justly, from his view- 
point — conceding any alarming figures. In half 
an hour this was all that one could get out of 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 85 

that alert, questioning, and genial master of a 
nation's fate, who, with his grey-white pompadour 
hair and over-bright eyes, somehow suggests a 
young lion, though he is quite sixty. One of his 
sons has been killed, another wounded, yet he 
wears no black on either arm of his small 
body. 

The same night, by rail, on this last lap to the 
front, was but following the white trail of the 
scourge. All along the ties and rails it lay, livid, 
in the tons of lime scattered there to destroy in- 
fection dropped by returning sick and wounded. 
Next day many passing hospital cars bore in white 
chalk the fateful legend, Cholera verdachtig. 
We may land in one of these yet. That night 
we moved our blankets from the stuffy carriage to 
sleep in the open air on one of the flat cars that 
carried our motors. And we woke in the morn- 
ing to find hanging, one on the foot of my navy 
cot, one on the radiator of a machine, two pairs 
of much-soiled undergarments flung from a pass- 
ing train. 

By three o'clock in the afternoon we had 
passed seven trains. In one I counted twenty- 
seven cars, with but a single surgeon aboard. 
And from the battlefields in this region alone at 
least three lines of rail are open. Ever since the 
war began I have been haunted with the thought 
that no human agencies could, with all justice to 



86 FIVE FRONTS 

modern altruism and science, cope with the masses 
of wounded. Here, for the first time, the truth 
of such a speculation hit me concretely. As the 
jammed cars ground westward, the great red 
crosses on them, the " Kranke " in black letters 
underneath, began to dance in the back of my 
mind. Vanished, those shadowy crosses still flew 
over the weeping willows of the roadsides, over 
the high thatchings, green with moss, of the 
peasants' log hovels. And you knew that over 
with the Russians the same pitiful cargoes were 
trundling eastward. 

Still they passed us. Arms were thrust out 
from bandages, holding caps, which we showered 
with cigarettes. The men shouted and scrambled 
for them. Tied to the button on each man's right 
shoulder was a small white tag, noting the nature 
and location of his hurt. Occasionally at a halt 
some grimed and hairy fellow would step off for 
a moment upon the lime of the white trail, drag- 
ging after him a bandaged foot. And your one 
thought was: It all cannot last long — it never, 
never can last. The while the famous Viennese 
caricaturist in our party, which included all social 
degrees from a real Hungarian nobleman to a 
" sob-sister " from New Jersey, sketched us on the 
outside of our carriage into roars of laughter. 

Then the Russian prisoners. Mostly they 
peered from tiny gratings in the tops of their 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 87 

wheeled prisons, the round-brimmed, khaki-col- 
oured caps looking ironically English above their 
snub Slav noses and corn-coloured beards. To 
my greeting in their language, " Drashtite! Kak 
■posheviate? " those crowded in the doorways 
around the bayonets of the guards returned the 
hail, and held out brass buttons from their uni- 
forms in exchange for cigarettes. Once, in his 
eagerness during a stop, one tumbled out, to be 
fiercely prodded back into the coop with a rifle- 
butt. 

The shift into the motors was at some tongue- 
twisting village. In the sunless and bluish Ga- 
lician haze we headed for Sanok, among the 
quilted cabbage and vivid green winter rye fields, 
along roads marked with stucco shrines. Sanok, 
held for three weeks by the Russians, showed no 
more sign of that than one cornice, in the heavy 
house style of Poland, split by a shell, two bullet- 
holes in the Etappenkommando's window, and 
utter dearth of cigarettes and matches which is 
the unvarying mark of every captured town in 
Europe. 

Sanok, despite its horde of soldiery, its thrifty 
Jews, in their curled peikas and black coats, was 
filthier than the meanest Chinese village, and 
without China's lamp-lit gaiety. The inn where 
we spent the night had for sanitation only an open 
yard behind; but the proprietor's wife wore an 



88 FIVE FRONTS 

elegant wig, and her face was powdered. If 
Austria has never been able to clean Galicia, let 
the war give it to some nation that will. A sani- 
tary service, in our army's sense, appears not to 
exist with these Austrians. Vera Cruz, before we 
started to scour it, was a spotless town compared 
with any here. And sometimes one wonders why 
cholera haunts eastern Europe ! 

Thus next morning it was hard to show sym- 
pathy with my two naturalised fellow-citizens who 
tackled me on the eternal question of how to get 
back to America. They had their fare and their 
papers, but neither the initiative to start, nor to 
write to our Embassy in Vienna — to the servants 
they employed for the very purpose of helping 
them. Stated so, they gaped at the fact. 
Neither had ever been west of the Hudson or 
north of 14th Street. They were of that mass 
of immigrants whose money-orders support these 
Galician villages and half southern Italy. One 
was a little woman in black with a sharp chin 
and gold teeth bought on Grand Street; the 
man wore a " sealskin " coat, and greeted me 
over the top of a fence on the main street, be- 
hind which he was making such a toilet as one 
can in Galicia. Decidedly it is a country with a 
people which makes you an iconoclast regarding 
our immigration laws. This mine for the melt- 
ing-pot — and after the war we shall be deluged 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 89 

with its output — does fill one with understand- 
ing for the ideal yearnings to escape expressed by 
a Mary Antin; and at the same time makes you 
cynical toward the pathetic realism of Slav litera- 
ture. It omits the essence of life in its milieu — 
filth and stench. 

We followed the route of the Russian retreat. 
By ten o'clock we had overtaken and passed 
three trains of supply wagons headed for the front, 
in all 469 rigs, and not one motor-truck. You 
were in a different world, a different age, from 
the war in France. Long and narrow, on very 
small wheels, with in-sloping sides of woven wil- 
low withes, the soiled, hooded coverings of these 
carts suggested a toy emigrant train of our West. 
From every hilltop they wound forward, an end- 
less coil of evenly spaced, whitish dots along the 
road. We threaded them, the heaps of hay high 
on each tailboard. Vacant peasant faces under 
round sheep-wool caps stole cowed and wonder- 
ing stares at us, as they urged on the bony horses 
to the creak of countless little wheels in the glut 
of mud. You felt the amazing, searching force 
of organisation that war demands; ability in ad- 
ministration against grim, far-flung odds beside 
which the most complex commercial enterprises 
must be child's play. No. It could never, never 
last, this war. What of the wives, daughters, 
mothers, of those sturdy drivers? Barefoot in 



90 FIVE FRONTS 

the sodden fields they hoed over the muck for po- 
tatoes no bigger than walnuts. O, for one good 
winter blizzard in this grim land! The spring 
planting, the war, for the moment assumed an 
equal precariousness. 

Where these outfits had camped, or rested in 
serried ranks, suggested, but on an enormous 
scale, the Klondike trek in 1898. Fires twinkled 
among the heaps of fodder; grey, straggling pri- 
vates boiled soup in their aluminum pots. There 
were parks of artillery caissons, their trucks also 
heaped with hay. At a railroad station where 
we crossed the line, mountains of shrapnel and ma- 
chine-gun ammunition; a field bakery of a dozen 
oblong, low mud-ovens, belching smoke from 
stove-pipes. At one cross-roads, where plainly a 
stand in the retreat had been made, was an ar- 
tillery cover of pine branches stuck into the hill- 
side, dismembered wheels prone in the mud, a 
wrecked mass of wagons — yes, some marked 
with red crosses. But the smaller trains return- 
ing down the road bore the grimmest flavour. In 
most sat mute beings with bandaged heads, or 
grasping their canteens in arms not yet cased in 
sling or splint. Grey blankets outlined hidden 
shapes from which you turned your eyes, because 
they did not brace against the jolting. And still 
riding across the fields, emerging or vanishing 
along the lines of woods, lone horsemen kept up 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 91 

the search which the instinct of all flesh to hide in 
its final hour makes needful. 

On the long hill of switchbacks, leading to the 
divide I mentioned, pieces of lint and bandages 
were scattered among the alders. Everywhere 
were empty goulash cans, goulash being ration 
in this army quite as seriously as tea is for the 
Briton; and, maybe, too, it has paprika trans- 
ports. At the height of land, marked by a cross, 
we met the only motor of the day, and it was 
hitched to a team of horses. Down the other 
side, the road was being graded, and that by 
women, mind you, barefoot, with their short skirts 
hitched above the knees and hooded heads bent 
low on the long shovels. 

One had to pause and convince himself of the 
calendar year. Beside such a triumph of femi- 
nism, the next instant you were jerked back a 
century or so. A beggar, in his garb tumbled 
straight out of mediaeval allegory, sat waving on 
high a gleaming brass crucifix. Under the stone 
arch of a roadside shrine knelt a grey infantry- 
man, with bowed head and rifle leaned against 
the robe of Christ. And on the doors of the 
Ruthenians' cabins — the Little Russians — were 
whitewashed holy crosses, as a token to their in- 
invading brothers, modern angels of death, to 
pass them by in peace. 

War, you wondered, war again in this old, 



92 FIVE FRONTS 

blood-stained arena of Europe. And this was but 
the spoor and fringe of war. Shall any one ever 
see or grasp the seethe of it, who has the eyes 
and heart to tell the truth? 

It was thus we descended through the dark- 
ness, until the lamps of Przemysl looped upward 
in even lines from that river-bed, where 70,000 
men have just fallen within their shadows. 

Will the Russians take the city? They have 
not powerful enough artillery on hand as yet. 
But any fort can in time be starved out. Here 
Przemysl and Belfort are declared the two first 
fortresses of Europe. " But we know very well," 
one officer told me with true Austrian candour, 
" that Przemysl is not so strong." Still, as the 
world knows, the first lesson of this war has been 
the answer to, What is a fortress? Just march 
around it. Liege, Namur, Maubeuge, an army 
may march around, but not here, through the mud 
and forests of Galicia. 

But you hear no boasts; instead, if one pries, 
he gets a generous recognition of Russian 
strength. The feats of her artillery are one of 
the surprises of the war. " If our own were as 
effective, we should be in Kiev by now," General 
von Kusmanek, in command here, has said; add- 
ing, " And if the Russian infantry were as good 
as ours, they would have been in Cracow." Al- 
most a shameless confession, that, of Austrian 



CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL 93 

officers' inferiority, for it is upon the officer indi- 
vidually that the worth of artillery most depends. 
It is long after midnight. If I listen as I 
write, there can be heard the fitful, droning de- 
tonations of mortars in the outer cincture of forts, 
only one of which has yet been destroyed. 



Ill 



FROM THE FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 

I JOINED the daily sortie into this unending bat- 
tle, which rages east of here, in the half-circle 
sector from Radymno on the north to Sambor in 
the Carpathian foothills. 

At eight o'clock we left the Cafe Stieber. Its 
fetor and filthy tables were as yet uncrowded by 
stout reserve officers playing chess, in gold and 
scarlet trappings, dangling swords and clinking 
spurs. We carried bottled water that we had 
boiled, for the third word on every man's lips 
was " cholera." I was told off to an officer and 
warned not to lose him in the field. On the steps 
a dragoon used as a servant dabbed at his boots 
with a polishing cloth. In the street was halted 
a long line of field guns returning from action to 
be relined, their carriages mud-crusted, muzzles 
worn and scorched from breathing death. The 
grey beings perched beside them slept. 

We climbed into the straw that filled a spring- 
less, seatless, basket-sided wagon. At once the 
wizened and red-bearded old driver told me, and 
in English, that he used to work in a Connecti- 
cut watch-factory. He lashed the bony pair of 

94 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 95 

ponies, and when I declared them too weak to last 
the day out, he retorted in a breath cutting from 
alcohol how that was no affair of his. The long 
street led southeast from the rynek, by the heavy 
domes and gilt of a synagogue, by moving picture 
dens among the heavy lintels of deserted streets; 
past a rambling yellow hospital, its yard pitted by 
Russian shells. 

We became but a link in two tightly packed, 
moving lines, that all the way to the gate at the 
inner fortifications and beyond crept in opposite 
directions. It was the nourishing vein, umbilical 
cord, of the battle-line. Our procession of carts 
piled with hay, beef carcasses, flour sacks, ammuni- 
tion boxes, kept fouling, or was checked by, the 
returning stream. Drivers cracked whips at their 
poor rearing teams, shouted, dismounted to free 
the locked hubs. Most of the carts and caissons 
bound for the city were empty, but a few bore 
grimed uniforms and pale, loose-jawed faces — 
sick or wounded men — gaping vacantly at the 
winter mist that rose from the hundreds of sweat- 
ing horses. 

At last the gate, between zigzag fences of 
barbed wire, which pitched to right and left up 
the sodden grass of low hills toward two of the 
main forts. They were some two kilometres 
from the heart of the city, less than half a mile 
apart, and not to be recognised as fortifications 



96 FIVE FRONTS 

except that the birch groves crowning each had 
all their lower limbs lopped off. We dipped into 
a vast, open plain. The sun, an orange lozenge 
embroiled in haze, weakly glazed quilts of green 
rye, and the helmets of drilling cavalry. At 
scattered points on the soil that shone like jet, 
each company rode in a circle like a slow merry- 
go-round. 

Gradually the pollard willows that made our 
road an avenue lost their tufted branches, cut 
away to clear the view and make the great glacis 
we were entering, until they seemed less trees than 
the gigantic clubs of savages set up on end. Ap- 
peared the railway to Sanok, stalking across the 
plain in a thin comb of telegraph poles; then oc- 
casional houses, utterly demolished except for the 
brick stump of some chimney. A homing cart 
carried a huge white hog. 

" Like a general," said I, " going to a ban- 
quet." 

" But to be eaten," said my officer, Captain 
Michl, who in civil life is a poet and author, " not 
to eat it." 

Low wooden sheds flanked us on one side. 
The throng of blue-grey soldiers loafing against 
them with arms and heads bandaged, drinking in 
the pale sunlight — circular sprays of whitewash 
on the planks, Red Cross carts with searchlights 
parked across the road — marked this a field-hos- 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 97 

pital. It was nine o'clock. Away to the west, 
across the valley of the San, the dull tremors to 
which my ears had long been straining hardened 
into the boom and throb of heavy guns. Then 
before spread the first reservoir of our living 
streams, acres teeming with the life of a great 
base camp behind the firing line. 

Afoot, we entered between the red and white 
squares of two cavalry flags, into action and va- 
riety that snatched you back to those war scenes 
painted of Napoleon's days. Equal colour to 
the eye this indeed lacked; but in vastness and by 
the poignancy of sounds and scents it was outside 
any technic to portray. Your eyes were moments 
untangling from that pathless home of two army 
corps — 80,000 men — of wagons, horses, 
smoke, stacked rifles, mud, men, single entities 
like here a grey hill of oat-sacks, there a steaming 
pile of manure. A creek flowing through the mid- 
dle was dotted with bent men half naked, gossip- 
ing as they washed their clothes. Field forges 
squirted flame; there was a ceaseless ringing of 
hammers upon horseshoes, on cherry-red axle- 
trees; the continual thump of beaten horseblan- 
kets; the hail of comrades from one campfire to 
another where they boiled potatoes in their tight- 
covered, blackened pots, or strung shirts and 
trousers upon a rope line between tree-stumps. 

"Hello — American!" I heard, beginning to 



9 8 FIVE FRONTS 

feel that all here, relieved for a while in this safe 
cover of the forts, were too preoccupied to notice 
among them even an archduke. 

A grinning youth, square-jawed and with 
heavy eye-brows, slid off a wagon-tongue to seize 
me by the hand. And why? Because I was 
wearing the khaki and broad-brimmed hat of an 
American marine. Three years he had worked 
in an Ohio lock factory, returned without his citi- 
zenship papers to visit parents in Galicia, and been 
clapped into the army. I felt that he spoke half 
in gladness to meet a fellow-citizen, half in pride 
for his comrades to see that he recognised my rig 
and could talk with some one from our fabled 
land. All day my hat and laced gaiters branded 
me as plainly as if I had flown the stars and 
stripes, and proved the Austrian army polyglot in 
an unexpected way and by hardly generous means 
from our viewpoint. 

" You like it, having to fight," I asked, 
" whether or not you want to? " 

" Sure, when we're beating them," he said. 

" But now you're not." 

"Huh! Aren't we? The General says we'll 
be back in Lemberg in four weeks. It's only 
twelve miles to there, and four to Grodek, that 
we captured yesterday." 

There was nothing for me to say. I left him, 
wondering how a real American could be so credu- 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 99 

lous. He still believed authority, quite as the 
Vienna populace, when stunned by defeats, re- 
assures itself: " It is all right. Our Emperor 
will allow no more of that." Lemberg was forty 
miles from there, and Grodek, as every officer in 
the fortress knows, still in Russian hands. 

A hut flew a plain yellow flag, warning of 
cholera within. To the south a captive balloon 
lurched upward like some blind, gigantic insect. 
Stark white walls gleamed under it, surrounding 
what once had been a convent. Razed now ex- 
cept for the high gate and one mute' cross, that 
deed in holy Austria must have been some strain, 
and yet — what wonder is it that with each bel- 
ligerent in Europe beseeching the same God to 
throttle his enemy, War should not, as it does, 
look cynically upon Him? 

The next hail to my campaign hat came from a 
cart covered like a prairie wagon. Inside, in 
stocking feet and underclothes, a husky young 
Lieutenant of engineers was eating a breakfast 
of ham and, since in civil life he was a business 
man in England, Scotch whisky. The drink he 
poured me tasted after weeks in beery Austria 
as would a mango, say, to an Arctic traveller. 
We did not speak of surrounding battles, because 
a matter of far deeper moment obsessed his mind. 
He sought in me, as an American, a vicarious link 
of sentiment. Shyly Lieutenant Karl Hoffman 



ioo FIVE FRONTS 

drew from his dunnage an unposted letter, ad- 
dressed: Miss Helen Reese, 1300 North Cal- 
vert Street, Baltimore. They will be married, 
d.v., next spring. In case the missive never 
reaches her, Miss Reese should know that her be- 
trothed's new beard becomes him very much. 

Onward in the watchmaker's cart, freeing our- 
selves of the swarming camp, to bump across the 
railway at the station of Hermanovice. No 
earthquake ever wrought a neater job than dyna- 
mite in that village ; none could have so nicely 
piled the red roof tiles into heaps. Beyond the 
bare plain again, and over its eastern hills the 
dull reverberations now made you wait to speak 
between them. Suddenly before us scampered 
past three fleet, four-footed creatures, two wild 
deer and a doe. The hates of man spared 
not even them; war was crumbling the card house 
of life even into the depths of the wild; Nature in 
her last hidden nerve protested its oneness. And 
yet — there was an obverse to the shield. Thou- 
sands of men here were scattered in the faint 
earth mist, all with rifles, and in the final reckon- 
ing the defence of Przemysl may depend upon 
meat, yet not a single shot rang out, not a gun 
was levelled at those fragile, fearsome antlers. 
For miles those poor fugitives were the safest 
warm-blooded creatures. You seemed to face a 
miracle, till you remembered that all soldiers here 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 101 

were peasants trained to kill men as an art, but 
to hold as an arch crime in this land of overlords 
the sportive act of poaching. 

Toward 10 o'clock we quit our wagons for 
good, at a stream skirting the first hills. A new 
pile bridge, replacing that burnt by the Russians 
in their first siege, bore the steady, clock-like 
tramp of infantry bound toward the noisome 
shrapnel, now seen raising its chemical, imitation 
little clouds into the cirrus of the perfectly cleared 
day. " Fresh troops," remarked Michl, yet on 
halting a man or two would sink prone upon the 
blanket coiled over his hairy knapsack. Followed 
a train of field kitchens — " gulas agyu," called in 
the Hungarian ranks — with their black pipe 
stacks. On a hill, a man with a plane-table was 
working out angles of fire-control to guide some 
invisible battery through one of the army's nerves, 
the sheaf of telephone wires converging to a bare 
tree across the creek. A regiment of reserves 
on a near slope sat patterned like a human carpet, 
intent and quiet as the dead-heads outside a 
world's series ball-game. 

Nearer, a company commander addressed his 
men swinging out to battle, and you could hear 
the "Hoch! Hoch! Hur-rah! " that greeted his 
harangue. Where we waited for them to pass, 
two bearded privates were fitting a stove down in 
the smooth mud-yellow depths of a new bomb- 



102 FIVE FRONTS 

proof, chatting as unconcerned as the card-men 
who painted the trees at the Duchess's croquet 
party. A sergeant up on the bank was chasing a 
collie dog, and shouting — " Oberleutenant Hein- 
rich — Hier ! hier ! " 

But we were swept on from them, with the for- 
ward pulse of life, in wake of that last infantry. 
Over the bridge the road passed a whitewashed 
cottage. Beyond, a troop of red trousered Hus- 
sars, in their archaic flat-topped helmets, envel- 
oped us on the gallop. From a ditch came the 
third salute 

"You — American! " 

This time, it was a skinny-limbed young tailor 
with no teeth, who had worked for two years in 
New York and Philadelphia. And his was the 
same story: visiting parents in Cracow, no pass- 
port, helpless impressment into the army. 

" Of course, I wouldn't have come back," said 
he listlessly, " if I had known." 

"About the war?" I asked. 

" Oh, no, this country — " he amazed me. 
Something mute in his black eyes, furtive in the 
quiver of his hands, stirred my pity. " It's all 
so — so filthy." 

" But the outdoor life," I found myself speak- 
ing as to a child, " is more healthy than tailoring, 
don't you think? " 

He shook his head with a weary sigh. " Yes. 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 103 

But it does no good — all that," with a shrug and 
waving one hand toward the waxing battle. " It 
does no good, not to no one." 

I could as easily have cheered a man already 
dying. These encounters were getting on my 
nerves. And yet I would have quit sight of a 
bayonet charge not to miss them; they were mak- 
ing the day. Only in these places, under this 
stress, could I have so glimpsed the hearts of such 
fellow citizens, for otherwise and otherwhere we 
should have passed without a word. 

Soon thatched farms lined the road, its mud a 
foot deep. In one yard where a woman in a 
yellow hood calmly was mending her wellsweep, 
soldiers were digging trenches, and beyond, the 
great 15 cm. guns of a battery stood over the 
arched, black mouths of their bombproofs. We 
had passed them hardly a rod, could look back 
down their up-pointed muzzles, when they leaped 
into action. Straight over our heads, as we 
caught ourselves from reeling, rushed a mighty 
geyser of deafening, steely vibration. A grey 
haze floated from the pieces, languidly settling 
back on their trucks; but the woman's head had 
remained poked down her well. We were be- 
tween the lines at last, straight under the contin- 
uous give-and-take of the daily artillery duel, 
roaring, screeching, lacing the sky. In small 
danger from the Austrian batteries, because of 



io4 FIVE FRONTS 

their raised trajectory, but any moment meat for 
the Russian shrapnel, which with hardly a fainter 
pulse and whir kept spawning its hard white puffs 
over the yellow birch woods and lateral ribs of 
dark juniper scrub on the hills ahead. 

The road dipped into a hollow, a yard of fresh 
graves bulging on the soil to the right, and beyond 
a grey private or two was digging with sticks in 
a field for potatoes. On the left, as we mounted, 
soon to be sighted by the Russian look-outs, Cap- 
tain Michl gave the order for taking to a deep 
gully by the wayside. The road now was utterly 
deserted. 

" Right here," said he, " we were eight days 
advancing three kilometres." And the lines of 
torn trenches, littered with broken cartridge 
boxes, that ringed the slopes scarcely ten feet 
apart, attested that. Bloody field coats, stained 
bandages, shell clips, knapsacks, lay in the ditch, 
from which, every time we raised heads on our 
shoulders, the Captain would warn — " Mr. 
Denn! (my name as the Austrian officer grasps 
it). Keep down you' head, or the Russisches 
will see you." 

A biplane came strumming out from Przemysl, 
straight toward the Russians' fire, plainly to spy 
on their artillery positions. Instantly the salvoes 
from them — " we " fired single shots now — 
concentrated upon it, and rooted us in our tracks, 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 105 

watching this one-sided duel in the air. Globes 
of magically formed vapour spun toward those 
fragile wings, there in the clear sky, like foam on 
a stream. Their clatter relaxed. The plane 
paused, first to rise from that deadly fog, then 
plunge beneath. It hung in the air, so that you 
held breath. Somewhere broke in the gutter-gut- 
ter of a machine-gun. Then, whether in fear or 
prudence, having slivers of steel in silk and pilot, 
or with its brave purpose won, the bird presently 
dipped far to port, and banked away with a de- 
fiant clatter of cylinders, back toward the fort- 
ress. 

One-man rifle pits began to notch the gully, 
and a kilometre found us emerging before a tum- 
ble-down shack, a field-surgeon's head-quarters. 
Here a very blonde young doctor and three or- 
derlies, eating dinner off a stump by a heap of 
rusty rifle-clips, forbade us to go further on the 
road; there was no cover beyond, and instantly 
we would draw the Russian fire. From an Aus- 
trian battery hidden near we could hear the fitful 
zing! of primers testing out a breech. We heated 
our canned goulash and made tea on a mud stove 
in the hovel, which had neither beds nor chairs, 
but fourteen gay religious pictures in a frieze 
around the logs. 

Outside, we joined the surgeon to eat. Stiff 
and brooding from the first, he kept staring into 



io6 FIVE FRONTS 

his tin cup, stroking his thin beard. Down the 
road loped four long-coated soldiers carrying a 
stretcher, but the fellow under the grey blanket 
was leaning on his elbow, smoking. Two photo- 
graphers of our party arrived, and began to quar- 
rel because one had forged ahead of the other. 
But our host never smiled, and kept muttering in 
a low voice to Michl, whose jaw twitched a bit. 

Michl's face is strong for a poet's, and though 
heavy, large-browed and fine. But since we had 
reached here, and I had seen him peer behind an 
out-house, he had been silent and gloomy. From 
that direction all at once came a low, moaning 
sound. I got up for a look behind the shed, and 
the sight there sufficed. 

A middle-aged soldier with a Roman nose, and 
on his mud-daubed uniform the two green tas- 
sels of a sharp-shooter, was lying face-down on a 
grey blanket. Muttering to himself, he gasped 
every now and then, raising his head turtle-fash- 
ion, with a tremor of the whole body, and plung- 
ing his hands downward from his chest. The 
skin of his face was greenish, horrible. 

" Cholera," said Michl, softly, whose eyes had 
been following me. " He is dying." The young 
doctor quitted his meal with the abruptness of one 
suddenly seasick. 

The fellow sprawled there, between that shed 
and a moss-damp fence, the place to throw rusty 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 107 

cans and wire — a human being in his last throes. 
Once he seemed singing to himself. His voice 
would mount from a mumble into falsetto, and 
with dreadful, panting intakes reach a revolting 
pitch. 

" Ay-ay . . . Yi-yi-yi . . . E — eeef" 

He rolled on his back, as with the will of one 
in frenzy, but could only feebly rub, and rub, and 
rub, his stomach. 

" Why — why don't they move him some- 
where? " I asked Michl, back at our food. 

" What use? We can't take enough carts out 
here, haven't enough men for the stretchers. The 
living first. He'll be — done, in an hour. Let's 
get out of this." Michl rose. Already the pho- 
tographers had gone into the house. 

Just then a huge, glazy motor-car whizzed 
down the road so " dangerous " for us. A gloss 
of furs, a gleam of scarlet chevrons, the flash of a 
helmet, and the car was gone. But one face of 
the three in it I had caught: hard high cheekbones 
like mahogany, and a waxed grey moustache. 

" There's transportation now," I said. 

" That," gasped Michl. " That. Why it is 
our Emperor's Cousin, the Prince Leopold Sal- 
vator! " 

" And terribly late for his dinner, isn't he? " 

The noisome afternoon was no longer young. 
Back we ducked through the ditch, and crossed 



ioff FIVE FRONTS 

the road south, past the graveyard, and to the 
base of the tiers of trenches. Here were two 
" general " graves, each marked by a cross of 
birch with the bark on, stacked rifles muzzle-down 
in the ground, one pair hung with a bugle the other 
with a cartridge belt. Indelible pencil related 
upon one of the cross-pieces whittled flat: 

JNRJ 

Hier Ruhn mit Gott 17 Man vom Lir. No. 21 und 
Lir. No. 13 riiht samft. 

We wanted to mount the hill, for over its brow 
the song and roar of Russian shrapnel was too 
loud for the few woolly clouds leaping into view. 
Surely they were shooting lower up there, search- 
ing out at close range a battery nearer than the 
one at the farm passed in the morning, which yet, 
shooting granaten and not shrapnel, kept up its 
single ze-eeing challenge. 

" It is possible," said Michl. " But do not go 
beyond those shelters." He pointed to a long 
huddle of them against the horizon, deserted, 
roofed with timber over ruined mud walls; and 
turning his back, made off toward the farm. 

For the first time we felt free, and started up- 
ward on the run, leaping the crumbling earth- 
grooves, with their sodden ruck of dead men's 
trappings. Pale flowers, like tiny primroses, 
bloomed close on the black earth. Over the ex- 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 109 

ploding clouds an eagle was poised, as if a gale 
were blowing from them and he were joyously 
breasting it. Crosses were stuck wherever the 
earth was fresh around the bombproofs; and they, 
straw-lined, wrecked and riddled, could not have 
spoken louder of death if the corpses had been 
bare. Beyond, we crept down a slant toward a 
very madness of day-fireworks and sound. 

The battery seemed less than three kilometres 
away, behind the line of birchwoods topping the 
next rise. Pale, winking flashes strung in dots 
between the shadowy tree trunks. Above, the 
expanding snowy balls might have been curdled 
fragments of some white thunder-head, hurled 
downward between us and the yellow groves. 
Many expired not three hundred yards away; 
some, likely ill-timed, spewed a flock-like vapour, 
lazily, along the dank grass. A spectacle trans- 
fixing, before thought of flight or danger could 
supervene. 

"Hi — hi! Was machen sie hier?" came a 
shout behind. 

Up the slope from the right ran an ungainly 
under-oflicer, shocked and breathless. Sight of 
our black-and-yellow brassards softened his anger 
that we should be, as we had hoped, directly in 
the line of fire between two opposed batteries; and 
he led us down the hill, straight into the muzzles 
of the well-hid Austrian pieces that the Russian 



no FIVE FRONTS 

fire was searching out; there to square ourselves 
with his superiors. 

Easy enough; they not even asked for our 
papers; that we were here proved our permission 
to men of the firing-line. Not their job, as 
trained soldiers, and the first I had met in Aus- 
tria, to question and suspect. They greeted us 
with unreserved joy, friends ready-made, through 
pride in their authority and responsibility; through 
the professional fighter's native simplicity, which 
is the same the world over. 

" We do not yet fire," explained a snub-nosed 
lieutenant, " because the enemy not yet have 
found us." 

" Probably they will not find us," said, a cap- 
tain, who wore a raw-hide jacket embroidered as 
if by our Indians, " unless they have seen you up 
there. But our turn to shoot is soon, and then 
you must go back." 

" Your turn? " we asked. 

" Our move. It is like a game, this battle of 
positions. A chess-game." 

They had been here eight days. The largest 
bombproof behind the rank of six stubby howit- 
zers had " Villa Erdloch " pricked out with brass 
geschosskappen on the mud of its roof. Every 
man was fit, bronzed, eager. You felt the con- 
trast to the stout, self-important tradesmen mas- 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE in 

querading in uniforms of the Stieber, to the ele- 
gant graf-lings with diamond bracelets one sees 
on Vienna streets. Countries looking for neu- 
trals' press-sympathy should let reporters mingle 
with the real men who do the real fighting — not 
herd them with chocolate soldiers miles from the 
lines — if they want partisans. They would get 
them. 

An orderly came up the slope and dumped a 
pile of newspapers and letters on the ground, the 
first mail received for a week. It was ignored 
while we stayed there. The officers, joking and 
chattering, delighted in making their men snap the 
gun's breech-locks, load for us. They asked us 
the news of the world, and as the genial grey 
Hauptmann finally shooed us away, the Magyar 
painter in our party was repeating for the third 
time how Hungary was at last free — " Ungarn 
ganz frei" — of Russians. 

We followed the telephone line, strung on thin 
6-foot sticks, down the hill, past the graves, and 
took the road to the battery at the farm. Still at 
intervals it ripped out its blast that made a sheet- 
metal sounding-board of the skies. A voice from 
the 'phone in one of the pits arched with galvan- 
ized steel and sandbags called out the fire-control 
figures. One of the tiptoe crew, twisted the 
sights; others shovelled in the shell with no twirl 



ii2 FIVE FRONTS 

of a time-fuse, for they were shooting granaten. 
Some hand yanked at a cord — the sole fist in 
sight not pressed to an ear. 

But suddenly, as if the throbbing shell we last 
fired had struck a wall in the ether, bounded back 
over us, pale flashes tangled the woods on the 
rise close behind. The Russians at last had 
spotted our position. Instantly the stout captain 
by the guns gave an order, and the crew ducked 
into the caverns. I walked over to him and asked 
why we had stopped shooting. 

" Why? " blurted he. " Another shot of ours, 
and they may see to drop their fire straight on 
us." 

The game was clear then. Some position, 
which we had been shelling all day, at length had 
found ours. Check and counter-check. It was 
the Russians' move now, and our cue, since, un- 
harmed, they had found us, to keep still and not 
be put out of action. 

They were firing salvoes of granaten, in threes, 
at about five minute intervals. Came a vibrant, 
invisible, whirring crescendo; the roar of explo- 
sions, and in the field at the corner of the grove, 
a fountain of inky soil. Thirty, forty, feet or 
more it kicked up; and soon invariably in the 
same spot, not fifty yards beyond us. The shots 
were bunched perfectly; the deflection was exact, 



FROM FORTRESS INTO BATTLE 113 

for a hair's lowering of the range would have 
wiped us out clean. 

A grey group of reserves under a big empty 
straw rick began to shout and scuttle out to the 
road. For me the moments raced; in the spaces 
between the ear-splitting, thumping roars, I stood 
breathless, trying to count the salvoes, and keep 
my mind off the inviting darkness of the arched 
proofs. I think that eight fell, filling a good half 
hour, anyway, before they ceased. I did not re- 
member it till afterwards, and then somewhat 
guiltily, but during that time my unseeing eyes had 
been fixed upon this : The woman in the yellow 
hood under the empty rick. In her short skirt 
and high leather boots she had never once stopped 
feeding straw into a hay-cutter. And all the time 
her little girl in a red dress, with a pig-tail down 
her back, equally nerveless, undismayed, was 
working the handle of their rude machine. 

" They have lost our location," grinned the big, 
clean-shaven captain as I walked out to the road, 
bound for the watchmaker and his cart across the 
creek. " If they begin on the same range to- 
morrow, they will not find us here. We move 
early up the road." 

The moon was growing silvery in the early 
dusk. A dragoon came out of a long red build- 
ing, a cavalry stable, under the grove where the 



ii4 FIVE FRONTS 

first shells had struck. One had wrecked the roof 
and killed three horses, he said. 

A youth driving a field kitchen hailed me, in 
English. William Krasnik, he was, with the 
usual tale: "Home" for three months without 
his " papers." But I am glad I got his name, for 
his case was different — slightly. 

" Where from in the States? " I asked. 

" I didn't say States," grinned he, " nor how 
my papers was American." 

"What, then?" 

" From Red Wing, Alberta." 

We gossiped a while of the free, northern 
wheat country, before the anomaly hit me. From 
the Saskatchewan to the San. From plough to 
goulash kitchen. War made anything possible, 
even a Canadian, a subject of Britain, happy in 
her enemies' ranks. 



IV 



DEAD RADYMNO 



What one writes for publication of life in 
Przemysl must be shorn of military verbiage, even 
of statements too strikingly human. Small de- 
privation; for one becomes most concerned with 
the trivialities of his own existence. You may 
swear that you feel no dread of cholera, since vac- 
cination has reduced its mortality from 90 per 
cent, to 7 per cent.; but your diminishing supply 
of alcohol to boil water for washing hands and 
face grows to be almost an obsession. You spend 
half a morning trying to buy chloride of lime for 
disinfection. Just now, at last returning with 
some to treat my hotel, the Grand Lipowicz, two 
private soldiers, who saw a cigar sticking out of 
a pocket, tried to grab it from me, and only re- 
tired, sheepish and saluting ; when I told them that 
it came from the officers' mess. 

But yesterday (November 2) a Lieutenant 
whispered an offer of diversion. We were sit- 
ting, of course, in the spacious Cafe Stieber, al- 
ways so crowded with reluctant uniforms. A 
month of Austrian cafes — where one must beg 
on his knees for anything except coffee and cold 

115 



n6 FIVE FRONTS 

water — and the habits they inspire have, paren- 
thetically, given me a brilliant tactical idea. The 
coffee-house of the dual Empire is a profound 
expression of her military genius. It solves the 
problem of how to kill the Austrian officers' worst 
enemy, time. To keep Przemysl from being suc- 
cessfully invested, there should be built all around 
it, outside the fortifications, a complete chain of 
coffee-houses. No Russian army could ever clear 
them of its enemies' gay uniforms. 

Would I go to Radymno in the morning, 
northward on the Jaroslav Road, and hardly six 
miles away? Even then, through the magnetic 
walls of the Stieber, you could hear the cannonad- 
ing in that direction. And Przemysl offered no 
thrill more exciting, now that all inhabitants with 
less than three months' food have been sent away 
and provision stores show empty shelves, than 
sneaking into a cukernia by the side-door and eat- 
ing chocolate cakes — the Galician idea of a 
" speak-easy " — which are contraband, as is all 
food for sale. 

At eight in the morning our car untangled it- 
self from the ceaseless lines of troops, peasants, 
supply carts passing through the city, and we 
crossed the River San by the cantilever bridge. 
On that side, a steep slope leads to the fortifica- 
tions, past the Tennis Club and K. u. K. Epidemie- 
spital. We had met but one dead horse by the 



DEAD RADYMNO 117 

time we reached a timbered hill, being logged to 
make a glacis. For an instant here one might 
have been in our own Northwest; even the gullies 
all about were filled with lopped branches; this 
to entangle an enemy in attack. At the inner cir- 
cle of zigzag, barbed wire fences, two little huts, 
having gun-ports and sides all thatched with wil- 
low withes, blocked the road. In a mile, at the 
outer circle, we slipped cartridge clips into our 
rifles, and the Lieutenant consulted volubly — 
but returned reassured — with a sallow sentry. 
Here the slope on both sides swept up to the hid- 
den fortifications, and the field telephone to the 
outlying batteries and trenches stalked forward 
across desolate levels on its little poles. Soon to 
the right appeared the hangars of the aviation 
field, and we passed a Red Cross station, a long 
hut half underground, completely walled and 
roofed with sod. 

After two miles, suddenly, not a human being 
was in view. We had no idea how close the Rus- 
sian lines were, and so got out and walked a while, 
keeping our heads well below the banked sides of 
the road, until we sighted a distant group of Aus- 
trian sappers, and returned for the car. On the 
way forward again, we met two women peasants, 
one of whom, in a vivid blue hood, assured us 
that there were no Russians close to Radymno; 
and soon it seemed that we were surrounded by 



n8 FIVE FRONTS 

peasants working in their bleak fields, intent, un- 
seeing, poignantly summarising what had long 
been for me an inner meaning of this war. 

This was the unconcern of these Slav peasants, 
their terrible, tragic indifference to any fighting. 
There they bent, old men, older women in short 
flaring skirts and high knee-boots, digging their 
small potatoes — digging as against Judgment 
Day, with short-handled hoes, shaped more like 
axes, the last crop to be taken from this soil, from 
which their blood has sprung; the last for years, 
forever? Never did one look up from his toil, 
in those fields all seamed with rifle-pits, either at 
the scattered sentries, each standing in the smoke 
of his underground fire with only a bayonet pro- 
truding from his muffled hood; at the loping 
stragglers along the road, bearded youths in 
dusty, baggy grey; at our lone motor car; nor did 
they look the other way toward the continuous 
Russian cannonading just beyond the railway track 
where it crossed our road, and Radymno on the 
left. 

The war was no longer young; but still it 
seemed no affair of theirs. No more to those 
gnome-like spirits of the soil than in times of 
peace were these same passing horsemen, or any 
rich man's automobile. Here were two worlds 
which even war had failed to link; two worlds on 
the same terrain of a single planet. Yet the sons 



DEAD RADYMNO 119 

of those peasants could then have been fighting, 
dying. What of it? The parents might hear 
some day, or might not. It was a fact of their 
dim existence to be accepted with the same fatal- 
ity as drought or snow; a dispensation far less vi- 
tal or momentous than the housing of a crop, or 
a cow's calving. 

Maybe the bleakness of everything depressed 
us. At home, even we have no November days 
so dark and dour, damp and raw, as these upon 
the uplands of the great Baltic plain. It was not 
freezing, but the icy east wind searched and cut 
our furs. All around the endless avenue of pol- 
lard willows, against the squat, black horizon, 
showed the occasional great dome of a church in 
the prevailing Polish style; and everywhere the 
roadside crosses, coloured madonnas in their 
stucco niches, even ikons mounted behind glass 
under the thatched eaves of cabins, gave one that 
bewildering sense inseparable from any European 
war-field, of the combined futility and persistence 
of religion. 

We passed a squalid village, empty except of 
red-trousered dragoons, stamping their feet 
around straw fires. Two furiously pumped the 
bellows of a field forge, using its incandescent 
coals as a campfire. Towards us lurched over the 
hard ruts a dilapidated barouche with two white 
horses, driven by an infantryman, a flopping rifle 



120 FIVE FRONTS 

strapped around his shoulder. From its covered 
depths sprang a very tall officer who, after a few 
words of guttural German, caused the Lieutenant 
to exclaim to me, " All right ! " 

Still onward. To the right, over a low flange 
of green winter rye, waited a silent battery of 
field-guns, the men invisible in their subterranean 
proofs. Suddenly by the roadside we saw the 
shell-shattered face of what once had been a 
breadshop ; the collapsed roof of a straw rick; a 
long row of one-story buildings pockmarked by 
machine-guns. We crossed the abandoned rail- 
way tracks, turned to the left on the Jaroslav 
Road, as it forked also towards Lemberg, and 
got out of the machine, well within the village of 
Radymno. 

In France I had seen towns much like it, where 
the quick tides of assault and counter-occupation 
had left that wreck, sadder than combined fire and 
earthquake make, of shrapnel, bayonet, and loot- 
ing. But Radymno spoke a word beyond even 
that; perhaps because of the ruder flavour of this 
eastern war, of its desolation in a land always 
poorer, of the fact that, although Radymno had 
been demolished for weeks, granaten were still 
whiffling over the skeleton of it. 

Behind the leafless birches to the left, a few 
soldiers lingered in the gaping door-ways of a 



DEAD RADYMNO 121 

yellow brick barracks. Ahead, the mud that had 
been a street dipped through a hollow, then up 
past a great sandstone church, built on the lines 
of St. Isaac's in Petrograd. Telegraph poles lay 
split and prone, amid tangles of wire. We met 
a soldier or two mooning along on duty, and of 
each one in turn the Lieutenant asked the number 
of his regiment. 

"Achtzig" came the answers, "Achtzig, acht- 
zig." 

Why did he repeat his question over and over? 
Every one had the same red oblong on his grey 
collar. Why keep on making certain? 

We stopped in front of the church. The in- 
habitants had been russophiles, Ruthenians. Cer- 
tainly the structure was splendid out of all pro- 
portion to what the village could have been; 
and almost unharmed. In the central dome, on 
each of the smaller ones, were but a few shell 
marks, like broken blisters. The pediment bore 
a painting in yellow distemper of Christ and St. 
Peter sitting tete-a-tete, with staffs and haloes. 
This was intact, but the glass of the transepts 
above was shattered. Behind, a slope fell to the 
sterile plain, bounded within less than a mile by 
woods, where behind a black clump of spruces the 
enemy's invisible battery, in action, was drawn up. 
In my week around the fortress, this was the near- 



122 FIVE FRONTS 

est I had been to one, though at some points in- 
fantry outposts had been reported but forty paces 
apart. 

We turned through the main street. Not a 
door nor window-sash remained in any house. 
Within their oblongs, among the charred walls 
and naked chimneys, could be seen no recognisable 
belonging of home or shop. Only ashes, sodden 
straw where horses had been stabled, twisted 
metal things. Here before a door-way was a 
heap of brass belt-buckles, from dead Austrian 
soldiers by the double eagles holding the globe 
and sword designed on each; there, a litter of 
bloodsoaked underclothing, a heap of broken 
rifles, warped bayonets, knapsacks. From torn 
cornices reached down long tentacles of tin roof- 
ing, sometimes draping a second-story balcony. 
They quivered in the raw wind with ghostly 
sounds, and regularly as the shells passed over- 
head — in threes now, at about five-minute inter- 
vals, giving out their silky-metallic waves of sound 
— every sliver creaked with an added vigour. 
You heard the tinkle-tinkle of glass splinters fall- 
ing, as if by some magic out of the terrible pulsa- 
tions of that blank, dark sky. 

Now not a human being was in sight, as we 
turned into the market square. And in such a 
place in Galicia life usually swarms, with cattle, 
basket-sided carts, and the booths of importu- 



DEAD RADYMNO 123 

nate Jews, in an intensity out of keeping with 
the size of a village. Where had they all gone? 
What and who was giving them food and shelter 
now, in this lean land? The houses wrecked 
worst invariably bore signs in Yiddish characters. 
Still standing on what appeared to be the town 
hall, was a high, square zinc clock-tower, with the 
hands on each of its four faces stopped at differ- 
ent hours. 

No inhabitant had returned here out of senti- 
ment for his home, or to hunt for possessions. 
There was no more danger than there ever is un- 
der artillery fire like this — the same chance of 
being hit as of lightning striking you in a heavy 
thunderstorm; but there were no possessions. 
Alone untouched by any shell, a sandstone statue 
of the Virgin stood in the middle of the square, 
behind an ugly little wrought-iron fence. Perched 
on one outstretched arm, she held a tiny and 
rather bijou Christ, yet with a very living gesture 
of offering Him. 

We swung to the right, toward the Roman 
Catholic church, its walls torn by shells, but the 
roof not caved in. In front of it was a wrecked 
bed and a black horse-hair sofa, with beyond, 
lurking along under cover of the ruins, the sole 
civilians we saw that day in the range of fire — 
a woman hooded in black, her husband in his 
round sheep cap and splay rawhide coat, their son 



i2 4 FIVE FRONTS 

just old enough to walk. I wondered if the fur- 
niture were theirs. But they seemed not to no- 
tice it. Instead, like a ghost, the man kept turn- 
ing from the wall to gaze at the wrecked house 
on the corner, where on a balustrade were still 
two imitation century plants, topped by those pea- 
cock-green glass globes that you see in all Polish 
gardens. The wind flapped and flapped the black 
sheeps'-wool edging of his coat skirt, and the 
woman would tug dazedly at her high boots. 

From here we turned back. The Jaroslav 
road fell into open country again. Across it, to- 
ward the Austrian battery behind us, and on the 
other side of the railway, the Russian shells were 
falling. They were covering the road, of course, 
guarding the approach to Jaroslav, hardly four 
miles away. Still, I was willing to take a chance 
along it, remembering the identification I had ob- 
tained from the Russian secret police a year be- 
fore, in case of capture. But naturally the Lieu- 
tenant had no such optimistic views. 

" The minute we show our heads on the road," 
he said, " they get our range and kill us." 

" But we can go like h in the machine. 

Too fast for them to hit." 

" Not in the mud. I would not try that for 
five million kronen. They would fire to wreck the 
road before and behind us, so we are caught be- 
tween." 



DEAD RADYMNO 125 

In the square again we fell in with a young sol- 
dier, who had a pinched, ashen face. He dogged 
us, continually shifting his rifle from one shoulder 
to another, pointing out houses across the square 
— one particularly, with huge stucco pillars rising 
straight from the muck — and muttering: 

"Cholera! Cholera!" 

" In them still? " we asked. " The bodies not 
buried yet?" 

" Ya, ya" And he kept plucking me by the 
arm, to follow into one of those charnels which so 
seemed to be unnerving him. . . . 

All at once, on the surrounding shreds of roof 
and crumbling cornices, broke out that mysterious 
pick-pocking of machine-gun fire — always a fur- 
tive, elusive sound at first — which I had not 
heard since August, when with the British in 
France. Up to then, the loudest sounds between 
the cannonading had been the incessant twittering 
of a horde of sparrows carousing in the deadly 
litter of that empty rynek. 

The ravens, always circling above, never ut- 
tered a croak, but they were very fat. . . . 

" What do you suppose they're after? " I said. 
" The dead must all be buried deep enough." 

" Ought to be," gaped my Lieutenant. 

" And even ravens ought to have some re- 
serves. Of instinct, say, against cholera — pick- 
ings." _ 



126 FIVE FRONTS 

" Let — let's ask them, eh? " with an uncanny- 
laugh. 

High time for us to be off. Higher time that 
that young, ashen soldier should be relieved. 

We cranked and climbed into our car for the 
return here across that biting desolation — to the 
Cafe Stieber, and chloride of lime. 



PART III 
IN SERVIA 



THE RETREAT FROM PRZEMYSL 

Mitrovitz, Slavonia (Hungary), November 
20. — Forced a fortnight ago to leave Przemysl, 
one makes an Odyssey through Hungary, and at 
last lands in Servia, which lies just across the 
River Save from here. This may be retrogres- 
sion in a military sense, yet only in so far as fol- 
lowing a stream to its source is that. Forward 
now lies the distracted land which at least was the 
physical birthplace of the world war, still quiver- 
ing from events — undercurrents, in its surge — 
never yet grasped at home. 

A Red Cross train of four engines and thirty 
cars smuggled us out of the fortress after dark. 
All the morning to the northeast from the direc- 
tion of Jaroslav the cannonading was closer, and 
louder than we had heard it for a week. De- 
tonations seemed to shake the gilt weather-vane 
of the Galician arms (a bear under a single star) 
which topped the ancient tower by the rynek. 
Here the same wagon train that had been creak- 
ing west the midnight before was passing in the 
morning. 

Knots of long-coated Jews gathered broodingly 
129 



130 FIVE FRONTS 

to watch. It was the first sunny day for an age 
in that fog-frosted valley; yet that same elusive 
spell of coming change filled the air that I had 
felt in certain French towns. " Only strategic — 
a new plan — two army corps shifted," one was 
told. But the great retreat in which that force, 
failing to join with von Hindenburg, was sur- 
rounded and lost, had begun. And we were 
swept along, atoms in its ruck. 

Far away now, I cannot help wondering 
whether back there in the Cafe Stieber orders are 
being given in German or in Russian to-night. 

The rails to Sanok were still open. With the 
light in every car extinguished, quite as if we were 
on an ocean liner, we passed mountainous heaps 
of flour sacks and ammunition boxes, against 
the siege now begun and likely to last for 
months. They reached almost to Hermanovice. 
From there, ruddy campfires, and signal lights 
that you watched to see suddenly extinguished, 
ringed both our horizon to the right and the ene- 
my's to the left. A blazing shack close to the 
rails slid by. Just ahead, between Novi Miasto 
and Dobromil, the Russians' positions were only 
three miles to the east, and that very afternoon a 
supply train had been shelled and wrecked exactly 
where we were to pass. 

There was a low moon, entangled in a seethe 
of mists. At first we could see off in the enemy's 



RETREAT FROM PRZEMYSL 131 

direction only to the flat path for moving heavy 
artillery, rolled by some great machine on the 
black ploughed soil. We stopped to let a freight 
pass, and I remember watching a bearded old 
Jew hustle furtively out of a boxcar and dash 
across the fields in the direction of the fortress. 
Here, as we waited out on the track, could be 
heard the ceaseless, nightly drama of the close-by 
trenches — the scattering, increasing, diminishing 
rifle-fire. Owing to some distortive quality in the 
thick atmosphere, it sounded like the muffled pi- 
ping of innumerable frogs in springtime. 

This came from a line of hills, occasionally out- 
lined through the fog, where two days before I 
had attended a field mass for a Tyrolese regi- 
ment of sharpshooters. At the time, such a 
mingling of the grim and the theatric had had a 
grotesque quality; but standing now for an hour 
by our train, listening to those bearded youngsters 
with edelweis in their hats invisibly testing the 
worth of their prayers, that ceremony on those 
ghostly heights assumed a new reality. 

The hills then had been naked and sodden, ex- 
cept for rows and rows of underground burrows, 
warm and stinking inside with brick stoves and 
straw bunks; for pits gouged by granaten which, 
even as the priest arranged his vestments in a lit- 
tle pine board hut with a Christmas tree stuck 
over it, began to wail and whiffle overhead. 



1 32 FIVE FRONTS 

Down the slopes came the soldiers, twisting in 
grey, converging lines, massed before a bench cov- 
ered with a coarse towel on which was a framed 
portrait of the Emperor and Empress dressed in 
the fashions of i860; a great layout of gold and 
silver medals with striped ribbons; a thing like a 
baby's silver rattle, and a heavy-topped cologne 
bottle. Beyond the priest in his golden stom- 
acher, a red and blue dragoon stuck his sword 
into the soil and hung his helmet on it. 

The service began. Rank after rank, the men 
knelt languidly, labouredly; and when they arose 
after the monotones and changing keys of chanted 
responses, hunched up their knapsacks and kicked 
their freezing toes into the hard soil. Irrever- 
ently I asked an officer why they had no choir of 
yodlers, only to learn that not one knew how to 
yodle ! He led me behind the throng, where, un- 
der a black and yellow imperial flag marked 
" 88," the magnets in a field telephone began to 
squeak and stutter. A corporal was answering in 
an outraged whisper. The officer squatted by a 
comrade on the steep incline, and, blowing his 
nose with a handkerchief that gave out a whiff 
of heliotrope, took to checking up the regimental 
lists. Then a lot of saluting began, ending with 
a general but meek, " Hip ! " The priest rang 
something like a dinner-bell, and began his ser- 
mon. 



RETREAT FROM PRZEMYSL 133 

" Liebe Kriegeskamaraden," I caught after he 
had hung a spruce wreath upon the Christmas 
tree. He rubbed one hand on his gilded belly, 
and with the other stilled his wind-blown, tawny 
beard; continuing with phrases like, " Kaiser und 
Vaterland "— " Tod in der Schlacht." The pith 
of it was, that while soldiers in the field wanted 
letters from home above anything, he was there 
to-day to give them the greatest letter of all, one 
from God, the Bible. His assistant in a purple 
stole shifted the wreath to the medals, dipped the 
rattle into the bottle. 

The General took the holy man's place. Sword 
superseded cross, signalised by a lull in the thun- 
der of the shells, a waving of the former's cocked 
hat, and a stiffening of attention all around. 
The General was a fellow with eyes of a usurp- 
ing blueness and rather a squat nose over a grey, 
square beard. At a short command, all the 
sharpshooters climbed the hill ten paces higher. 
With his vigorous words, the looks of meekness 
vanished from their faces. The wind flapped 
their long coats and capes, no more toes were dug 
into the soil, and the wagging of heads from side 
to side ceased. The General was coming down 
to cases. 

He thrust a fist upon his sword, pulled at his 
close-cropped black moustache, and said in effect, 
waving an arm in one direction: "When we 



134 FIVE FRONTS 

met the Russians yonder they did not give us time 
to bury our dead. Now " — shooting a hand to 
another quarter — "we will win back more 
ground over there, and bury their dead for them." 
The windy Ooo! of the closest shrapnel yet, put 
both accent and period to the challenge, and an 
aide with a hooked nose stepped quickly to the 
bench, took the largest gold medal (an Iron 
Crown of the Second Class) and hung it around 
the General's neck. " Hochf Hoch!" split a 
thousand throats. The silver medals with the 
red-striped decorations went to privates, as their 
names were called, and they stepped shyly for- 
ward. Sometimes no voice answered a name, 
and, after a pause — each as it came set my throat 
tighter — the murmur would run around : " Ver- 
wiindet." 

That other night of our escape, listening to the 
frog-like piping of their rifles, one felt that war 
itself was much of a ceremony. We did not 
move on until midnight, and then tore so fast be- 
tween Dobromil and Novo Miasto that I had no 
chance either to see the wrecked train or to carry 
out the plan long in my mind of dropping off un- 
seen and trying to make the Russian lines. But 
I will do that, yet. Morning found us stealing 
gingerly over jerry-built trestles, beside great 
bridges that were but drooping and twisted gir- 
ders. In the night three men aboard had died. 



RETREAT FROM PRZEMYSL 135 

An Austrian noble had charge of the train, but not 
one doctor was aboard. 

Long trains filled with landsturm passed, with 
mature, bearded faces, men laughing, happy, and 
waving at us from the side-doors of their boxcars. 
We could not but feel veteran and experienced 
beside them, and grasp the bright and homely side 
of war that was to be theirs. No daylight walk 
to the factory with dinner-pail for them, nor life 
as monotonous as the machines they tended; no 
more routine with crops and cattle, over-worked 
wife, and nagging kids. They were starting on 
an endless vacation with their pals, like an indefi- 
nite strike, with plenty of food and without a 
grievance. They were headed for amazing and 
romantic adventures, which, since they would go 
only to garrison positions already captured, in- 
volved no danger, but, close to the gossip and 
thrill of war, would make them ever after heroes 
in their towns and villages. 

Next morning our tally of dead was seven. 
So blocked was the railroad that we had not yet 
covered half the hundred kilometres back to Neu 
Sandec. It was four days before I was again at 
the army headquarters, in the little Polish hotel 
with the monkey-puzzler in the window of the 
back room, contemplating Servia, across the snows 
of the Carpathians. 

And this journey has only crystallised into 



136 FIVE FRONTS 

a final understanding the inevitable amazement 
of any traveller through the Germanic countries 
in this war. Once away from the " front," one 
has continually to nudge himself to believe that 
the great conflict is a reality. At home we do 
not realise how militarism, long preparation of 
the popular mind for war, has disciplined and dis- 
counted its stress and excitement. These lands 
find themselves facing the tragedy with a calm- 
ness and self-control easier than they or the world 
can have anticipated. Hungary, though only 
lately ridden of the enemy, was, except for the 
Red Cross trains and the groups of reserves ladel- 
ling goulash from the steaming cauldron in each 
station yard, the same quiet plain of maize fields 
and huge-skirted peasant women that it is in times 
of peace. The one sinister touch lay in the end- 
less way of anti-cholera lime along the tracks; and 
even this took on a gaiety by its whiteness and 
the figure of some bright-jacketed peasant on 
every platform, swinging a watering-pot that 
seemed to steam out milk. 

You felt that Budapest — that city more like 
New York than any capital in Europe — would 
receive news of victory, or defeat, with an equa- 
nimity to shame us, were we at war. Parenthet- 
ically, that likeness almost makes one home- 
sick; streets and populace resolve into a sort of 
glorified Sixth Avenue, and the signs over the 



RETREAT FROM PRZEMYSL 137 

shops in their Roman-lettered, oriental tongue 
spell into sounds exactly like our college yells. A 
Jew who has been in New York takes you aside 
in a book shop, furtively trying to argue that 
spring will see the Russians there; and you find 
the American Red Cross volunteers, with the 
bloom off their first enthusiasm, since they are al- 
lowed to " see nothing," planning to give up the 
" good chance to see the war " that has inspired 
their charity. 

Of course, in the Budapest war factories were 
girls condemned to filling cartridges and bending 
the stiff tin for goulash cans at a pittance a day, 
just as ten years ago I saw their sisters in Japan 
sewing sailors' uniforms. Perhaps one grows in- 
sensitive, but the sameness of war is not one of 
its minor drawbacks as a spectacle. You take tea 
with an American Countess, in what might be an 
upper West Side flat, though it is called a palace. 
She is the daughter of a Montana copper king, 
gossiping with girls who bear the name of a cele- 
brated water about the winter clothing of their 
respective husbands, now near Cracow. You 
wonder why it should be conventional to pity the 
fate of such an expatriate. And so you sail to 
the ancient fortress of Peterwaradin, just above 
Belgrade down the Danube, which is beautiful, 
but no bluer than the Mississippi, which it much 
resembles. 



138 FIVE FRONTS 

Here again one was in the war zone. In the 
commonplace of uniforms it was Galicia once 
more, except that white, long-horned oxen, in- 
stead of stubby ponies, drew the ceaseless streams 
of supply carts going and coming from the front; 
and leaves still clung to the sycamores of a fatter 
land. Every hour through the night sentries 
shouted the watchword, mediaevally, on the ram- 
parts of the fort. By day you were proudly led 
to the execution place of Servian spies in an 
abandoned moat. Not even in brutal Mexico is 
one reminded why certain lines of bullet holes 
against a wall lie at slightly varying heights. I 
felt like writing a letter of congratulation to Gen- 
eral Huerta. But down in the river the West 
emerged again in the person of Capt. Olaf Wolff 
and his river monitor, which has likely been un- 
der more continuous fire on the Save and Danube 
since the war began than any cruiser of the high 
seas. Yes, Wolff is a Hungarian-Norwegian, 
out-vying any hero of this polyglot empire : the 
calm sailor type with the crow's feet that a life 
of mid-watches etches in the corners of each eye. 
No life insurance agent would have taken his pre- 
mium, as I saw him off yesterday, to run again the 
Servian shore batteries near Belgrade. 



II 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 



Crnabara, Servia, November 25. — I have 
spoken of the echoes and undercurrents not yet 
grasped at home, to be gleaned from a trip 
through Servia, the brewing-place of all these 
wars. Well, I am writing in a Serb schoolhouse 
— " wrecked " is too bald an epithet even for the 
work of God and the spirit of man in this amaz- 
ing land. We are some thirty kilometres within 
its northern border, but as yet have heard no 
echoes and felt no undercurrents. We shall not. 
All northwestern Servia appears to be a tomb. 
Outside it is snowing furiously now. Occasion- 
ally, under the pale and marching gloom across 
the road you sight great pumpkins gleaming in a 
trampled, ungarnered maize field, or the shrapnel- 
torn branches of a line of bare acacias. On a sol- 
dier's bunk in the corner, by a broken plate of 
black honey, the Social-Democratic " journalist " 
from Budapest with us is making the same rat-like 
noises in his throat by which all yesterday he sig- 
nalised his satisfaction at a poor peasant nation 
more heartbreakingly rended, stamped out, de- 
serted, than the blackest corner of France or Bel- 
gium. 

139 



140 FIVE FRONTS 

" In Servia you will not be allowed to see as 
much of the fighting as around Przemysl," said 
my Oberleutenant yesterday, as we waited for 
the pontoon bridge across the Save from Mi- 
trovitz to fit itself together. " We cannot ap- 
proach the firing line. The Serbs are a very 
treacherous people. They have poisoned many 
of our soldiers. Why, last week when Valjevo 
fell, girls and women threw bouquets of flowers 
from balconies to our troops marching through 
the streets. Hidden in them were lighted 
bombs." 

" How despicable a revenge ! " I said. " So 
unfair for a nation of as many people as there are 
in New York city to wreak on great Austria- 
Hungary. And to think that everything started 
— all this world war — in a quarrel about export- 
ing pigs." 

" Pigs? Ah, yes," he laughed. "The export 
of Servian pigs to Hungary. But to have allowed 
Servia a port on the Dalmatian coast would have 
been giving it to Russia, the thing England kept 
her from, before their unnatural alliance." 

" So hence," I muttered, " the assassination and 
the war." 

Innumerable pigs were in sight — a great, 
shaggy-coated throng, rooting among the bleak 
sloughs of the Save, outside the shell-torn Servian 
Mitrovica, herded by three Croatian peasants in 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 141 

round black caps and splay rawhide coats. 
Except for the Austrian landsturm and clouds 
of carrion crows, these swine are almost 
the sole forms of organic life that I have 
seen for two days in a rich, once peopled corn- 
land, curiously like our own Illinois. It has been 
enough. More would be hard to behold and keep 
one's gorge in hand. 

Thirty miles of desolation, glimpsed through the 
swirl of snow or drizzle; and in all that area to 
have been not once out of sight of a sod grave 
and cross, from artillery positions that were but 
warrens of bomb-proofs roofed with timber and 
straw; from the labyrinths of connecting trenches 
strewn with the wrack of the dead's equipment; 
from shattered, looted farmhouses, wrapped in a 
ghoulish silence ! Between this village and the 
junction of the Save and Drina Rivers, where the 
fight was hardest in the last weeks of September 
and the first of October — some 120,000 en- 
gaged upon each side — I counted on a single 
battlefield eight lines of trenches, few more than 
two hundred yards apart, with the ground between 
rough as a nutmeg grater from broken shrap- 
nel. 

One gets calloused to such sights. And why 
waste pity upon tombs, upon this one great cata- 
comb, fated to be through a matter of pigs? 
Why should not Austria-Hungary tax Servia's 



i 4 2 FIVE FRONTS 

hams, and deny her the seaport earned in two vic- 
torious wars? She is the stronger. That is the 
Germanic philosophy that justifies so much that 
each belligerent has wrought since August i. 
Silly to dispute it. 

We ploughed from village to village, with such 
names as Glusci, Metkovic, Bogatic, Sovljak, on 
this fat river plain. But the thick population hav- 
ing been entirely peasant proprietors, the many- 
coloured farmhouses were continuous along the 
roads. At cross-roads there would be a rude 
cross or holy image behind a railing and under a 
small wooden shelter like an inverted V. 

The first real battlefield lay between Nocaj 
and Glusci, in the rushes and standing water of a 
big willow swamp. Six graves lay outside the first 
ring of sod-built caverns that marked an artillery 
position. On the lathe crosses, inscribed with the 
mongrel Servian lettering, hung elaborate green 
wreaths, one with long purple ribbons and a gilt 
inscription. Opposite, the highest line of trenches 
was crested with a low brick battlement, pierced by 
ports just large enough for rifle muzzles, as all 
the better earthworks are. Behind stood a small 
Greek church, windowless, the oval red tiles of 
its roof bristling upright and shattered from bul- 
lets. Within, gilt ikons, benches, candlesticks, 
gaudy vestments tripped you in a muddy tangle. 
Red-brown stains on the floor and the shattered 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 143 

plastering told a story that not even barbarous 
Mexico can match — of hand-to-hand fighting in 
a place of worship. 

You rub your eyes. Civilised beings killing in 
churches? You refuse to believe it, until, lurch- 
ing along, the venom of warfare here slowly stuns 
the mind with a respect for what of old was called 
savagery, beside such twentieth century perver- 
sions. Not a gaping, empty house that did not 
have its pocked lines of bullets between the 
smashed windows; not a yard unlittered with 
broken chairs, bedsteads, the straw torn from mat- 
tresses, and the bulging narrow-necked earthen 
Servian urns, glazed half in green, half in yellow. 
Mile after mile, and not a soul slinking about the 
empty outhouses with peaked, thatched roofs like 
enormous candle-snuffers; near the high corncribs, 
painted black below and above, quartered, squared 
and angled with red, yellow, and blue, like the pat- 
tern on a Navajo blanket. Not a windbreak of 
Lombardy poplars or a line of pollard willows that 
had not branches torn and drooping from shell- 
fire, and in every dooryard the pile of red bricks, 
some still symmetrically stacked, but mostly well 
demolished, behind which men had fallen in de- 
fending a fireside. 

Fallen there? Fled? Slowly you doubt any 
solution so happy or heroic. You remember the 
returned American emigrant who told you in Mit- 



i 4 4 FIVE FRONTS 

rovitz that these peasants had been captured and 
later shot by the thousand. I had smiled then, 
with my tongue in a cheek, only now to feel fiercely 
that I had done him a trivial injustice. Surely 
they had not died here; in the ditches were not 
enough of those surface graves, long ovals of cut 
sod that resembled deformed and enormous tor- 
toises. Not fled; for in France, where the 
slaughter was bitterest, at least the children and 
the aged returned with a desolate hope to rum- 
mage in their sodden belongings. Here there was 
no one; a people wiped out — with only the initi- 
ating pigs assembled to feed the assassins. Ex- 
quisite symbol! 

Yet gradually the interior life did emerge. 
The houses became pathetically more pretentious, 
with the dates of their erection lettered over the 
first-story windows; with glazed reliefs in colour 
between the lintels, of a saint's head, a bird, a 
coat-of-arms, and little peaked roofs over the en- 
trance gates. Down the highroad between cold 
pools of water, where the clematis still showed its 
fuzzy fruit quite as in our Northern States, creaked 
a cart piled with bedding and dark worn fur- 
iture. Through the mud beside it ploughed along 
an old bareheaded woman in a sleeveless skin- 
jacket, and the low sandals of her people with long 
up-pointed toes. Soon another appeared in a 
gateway, lugging a pail of water. 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 145 

" Serbischer! Serbischer! " exclaimed the 
young Bohemian peasant with the crooked mouth 
who was driving us, and nudged me with his whip 
in excited glee. But not over the women. At last 
there was a man, a Serb, in sight. He was such a 
being as quite naturally would cause a patriotic 
enemy unbridled joy. He was white-haired, and 
a cripple. His knees seemed glued together, and 
he fought on through the mud, swinging a stick 
with the dazed inconsequence of a blind man, and 
his body in reverse direction to it — a crab-like 
motion. 

The Social Democrat hit up his grunts, seized 
his shock of Karl Marx hair, and his stone-blue 
eyes gleamed. The Oberleutenant dropped his 
jaw, but no more. I wondered whether he was 
thinking of the eight Austrian soldiers now alive 
for every Serb peasant, or of pigs — or both, con- 
fusing all three. 

More women in their chimney-sweep boots we 
saw, one leading a skinny horse, another shooing a 
hen, but every one seeming engaged in some be- 
lated, instinctive duty, desperately, with bowed 
head and furtive movements, as if to cease it were 
to invite a fate they knew too well. But there was 
only one more man. He was peering, open- 
mouthed, from a shattered window, and his was 
the sloping forehead and wide-apart, upstaring 
eyes of an idiot. 



146 FIVE FRONTS 

"Serb !" began the red-cheeked driver, 

but ended with a playful grunt. 

I had jabbed the butt of his whip back into his 
stomach. Perhaps his ecstasy, greeting thus the 
sole type of progenitors for the future of this 
strong, pure race, as though it was a side-show 
freak, deserved a blow or shot. At any rate, I 
made the officer grin. But maybe he was only re- 
lieved that that idiot had not a bouquet-bomb con- 
cealed under the window-sash of his home. 

The future of a race. Servia, after this last 
of her three wars, should give the biologists who 
work in laboratories a better field for proving the 
magnificence of militarism than all the locked 
doors of Peace Conferences. Her strong sons 
are gone; men that the world has always needed, 
and, after this war, will cry helplessly for; men 
that we in America want. It is to wonder 
whether, for the horde of immigrants from all 
countries that is going to flood us if peace comes, 
we have yet bethought ourselves to deal with the 
unfit that must form their majority. 

One laboured on, filled with indefinable bitter- 
nesses. Behind, closed these stark sights with a 
dream-like finality that makes detailed recollec- 
tion hard. Outside each town rose a high and 
tapering pole, like a single radio standard, except 
that at intervals upon it cross pieces bore upright 
carvings like little candelabra, proving some reli- 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 147 

gious symbolism. Once, prowling among some 
out houses, I saw a sharp eared brindle bitch fol- 
lowed by two puppies limping and whining as they 
do before their eyes are opened. She was haunt- 
ing her old home, searching for the children, 
likely, whom the pups' birth had excited and mys- 
tified. Such a birth amid such death! And the 
dog's likeness, by some irony, suggested that wolf 
which one sees in bronze, who suckled the young 
Romulus and Remus from whom sprang all the 
empire of Rome. 

Darkness fell. We piled out at the last cross- 
roads into the ankle deep muck -and freezing 
drizzle of this village. The corner house, once a 
drinking-place, sent out the faint glow from a big 
drumstove. Inside, on bunks crowding the floor 
space, stifled in the foul air that Europeans seem 
to love, half a company of bearded landsturm. 
Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Teutons, they gave 
the lie to tales of racial quarrels and segregation in 
this army, and their diversity made them receive 
me without suspicion. As they played cards with 
one of those huge Austrian packs, they borrowed 
my tobacco, joked about my khaki clothes; and the 
Slavs chuckled at my Russian — all with the holi- 
day good-nature of reserves, tragic in its insensi- 
bility to the blasted homes and hearths outside. 

A Hauptmann sent for me, to his tiny cell of a 
room in the same building, lit by candles stuck into 



148 FIVE FRONTS 

bottles, its smashed windows stuffed with rags. 
He was the English-speaking type of reserve of- 
ficer, whom my days at the Austrian front have 
resolved into a type : the commercial Teuton called 
from England or America into an ill-fitting uni- 
form, and tinged with a cosmopolitanism that 
makes his partisanship, when he speaks English, 
seem half-hearted. This one had exported rosin 
and pitch from our South. You could see that his 
sun bleached beard was less a necessity of rough- 
ing it than a concession to the style of his re- 
adopted people. 

He started in great detail to rehearse the war 
here from its beginning — how the first fighting 
down near Valjevo forced the Austrian drawing 
movement (euphemism for retreat) to north of 
the Save, since which retribution all around had 
been visited on his enemy. And then, as usual, 
he ended, " But I get all my information from the 
newspapers." Indeed, what's the use? That I 
do not quote him is no reflection on his sincer- 
ity; only, I find myself clinging tighter than ever 
to the two axioms for reporters in this war, viz. : 
Expect 2 + 2 always to make 5. Believe noth- 
ing unless you see it ■ — and don't believe it then. 

So, instead, I steered him into the favourite 
pastime of all Teutons, which is to defend Ger- 
many's entry into Belgium. And the same two 
arguments appeared: the back-handed Jesuitry 



A GLORIOUS CATACOMB 149 

that France " would have violated the treaty, 
anyhow, if we hadn't"; that the Belgians 
were secretly bound to France, and were fools, 
who now cursed the Allies for not having accepted 
the bribe of non-molestation, practically to ally 
themselves with the invaders. But the Budapest 
journalist, who had followed us, ended this praise 
of sordidness by excitedly entering it with his 
grunts. And that, after two days of pretending 
that he did not understand English ! So I escaped 
him to this schoolhouse — one of the hundreds 
throughout Servia, in each of which, had she ac- 
cepted Austria's famous note, Serb teachers would 
to-day be telling children Austria's version of his- 
tory. 

All this morning I have been groping and stum- 
bling through the blizzard, on the aforesaid bat- 
tlefield between the Save and the Drina. But one 
has given picture enough of its edges. You sit 
upon earthworks strewn with empty cartridge- 
boxes, with every branch of the pollard willows 
behind snapped from the firing, and try to amuse 
yourself with the thought that, anyway, soldiers 
here have done more solid digging in a week than 
any subway contractor could put over in a year. 

Whole forests of saplings would be axed to 
give a glacis. You wander through artillery posi- 
tions, their caves and walls of sod bricks rein- 
forced by willow thatching, the water ankle deep, 



i 5 o FIVE FRONTS 

the dark interiors filled with bloody clothing, rusty 
trappings, mildewed boots, and grub. And 
wherever there is space enough between the great 
network of trenches, the little graveyards inside 
low palings, and the crosses of two staves with the 
pencilled inscriptions, the bedraggled wreaths. 
Overhead, always the 'guttural muttering of the 
swarms of grey-bellied ravens. Marvellous am- 
buscades there were — whole lines of apparent 
haycocks, that turned out to be brick shelters. 
Among the shattered houses, always the peasant 
woman's wooden trough for mixing bread lying 
split near the great mud oven. Every road axle- 
deep in mud, but alive with huge supply motors, 
many of them stuck and helpless, being hauled by 
shouting soldiers, that the bloodshed and devasta- 
tion may go on and on to the southward. 

I came upon but one corpse, among the golden 
pumpkins of what once had been a cornfield. The 
long rains had washed away his shallow grave. 
At each end you saw the outline of a skull, of legs 
and feet, stained with the palish green that cor- 
rupts such flesh. 

The Social Democrat may snore now all he 
likes. I have vented my feelings. For breakfast 
I have still a can of goulash, tea, and enough alco- 
hol in the tiny stove, without which you cannot 
live at such an Austrian " front." 



Ill 



PRISONERS AND AN AMERICAN 

Mitrovitz again, December i. — When I last 
left Vienna the premier of Weingartner's " Kain 
und Abel " was being given at the Imperial 
Opera House, and most of the cabaret shows had 
re-opened. One, at the Femina, was extremely 
funny. It was a burlesque on the war. The 
scene opened on Olympus, with von Moltke, Na- 
poleon and Radetzky — a cascade of green feath- 
ers in his helmet — discussing English diplomacy. 
English, French, Russian, German privates, 
splittingly caricatured, joked with one another 
in later scenes. One, in a coffee-house, for there 
Viennese ladies knit grey things to keep the sol- 
diers warm, a soldier impersonated one of them, 
holding up a stocking, as he said, " For my girl, 
with a limb two metres long." 

An Austrian official " very close to von Berch- 
told," as dispatches from Rome to the English 
newspapers say, told me when I asked him tc ex- 
plain such levity that the Viennese temperament 
just couldn't stand worrying and grieving any 
longer, simply had to break loose. The same 
man, incidentally, gave the most convincing justifi- 

151 



152 FIVE FRONTS 

cation for Austria's precipitation of the great war: 
The Servians are mad, ambitious barba- 
rians, anyway, bound to attack us some time; 
so it was better to fight them alone, while all the 
Balkan States were at loggerheads. But Eng- 
land plunged the world into war by her irrespon- 
sible alliance with Russia, who was bound to sup- 
port Servia. Yes, the German Foreign Office did 
know of the Sarajevo ultimatum before it was sent, 
but only " by a day or two." Germany cause it? 
Never! She had everything to lose and nothing 
to win by war. In fifteen years the commercial 
supremacy of Europe would have been hers, any- 
way. 

But I am writing in Slavonia, which is very far 
from Vienna, from cabarets, cafes, and foreign 
offices. Just across the River Save lies a great 
region, the richest in southeastern Europe, whose 
farms and cornfields as they are to-day would 
make Egypt after her last plague look like para- 
dise. Through Mitrovitz have just passed as 
prisoners 500 of the folk, or their brothers, who 
once raised corn and pigs and pumpkins and chil- 
dren, and defended wives and homes in that 
blasted area. There was nothing burlesque or 
funny about them, as they stood in the village 
square outside the Hotel Kovacs yesterday. They 
looked very barbarian, indeed, but in no way 
mad ; still, no one was sitting in the Kovacs coffee- 



PRISONERS AND AN AMERICAN 153 

house, knitting and cracking jokes about them. 

They had come from Valjevo, and reminded 
me most of men I had seen in the early Alaskan 
days, tottering into camp starving, exhausted, and 
diseased from the tragedies of the long trail. 
Not one had a complete uniform; here and there 
their khaki-coloured flannel trousers, the round 
caps, were eked out with long grey stockings, a 
blue Austrian coat, shirts and mitts gaily em- 
broidered by a wife or mother, but not for war. 
All wore the pointed Serb shoes, like Turkish slip- 
pers, and every garment was grimed, torn, mud- 
crusted. They had no knapsacks, but mostly car- 
ried bundles of blue or scarlet cloth; half had their 
arms in slings, heads bandaged. 

I have seen many prisoners in this war, but 
never anywhere living things so mute and desper- 
ate, so foot-sore and lifeless, so at their last 
gasp. They limped on, out of step, joggling 
one another, several of the weaker with arms 
thrown around the necks of their comrades. 
Even the Austrian guard herding them to the bar- 
racks down by the river, kept its eyes averted from 
them, and bayonets held carelessly. But all the 
faces in the captured throng were in some manner 
fine, with prominent cheekbones; rather dark and 
resolute and proud, with an oriental trace about 
the eyes, yet always with the pale Slav hair rising 
abruptly from their brows. 



i 5 4 FIVE FRONTS 

The populace gazed on in silence. You could 
even hear a gurgle of pity in some throats, as the 
most foot-sore fought on, excruciatingly. " Les 
pauvres ! " muttered an Austrian officer, a friend 
who always spoke French with me. " No matter 
if they are our enemies, they are yet human be- 
ings." But the next moment, when I passed a 
lieutenant cigarettes, and greeted him in Russian, 
a hand pulled me back and I was ordered to keep 
quiet. The young prisoner wore a purple chrys- 
anthemum in his coat, and you should have seen 
his face light up. 

Suddenly a little sallow old man, who still car- 
ried a queer round knife in his hand, fell flat in the 
mud, and stayed there moaning, rubbing a hand 
back and forth across his forehead, until a com- 
rade lifted him to his feet. An Austrian soldier 
pushed him on. He was a moving bundle of rags, 
his lined face blacker than a Turk's. He closed 
the procession; the last I saw of him, he was far 
behind all, with the soldier holding him up by the 
collar as he " walked Spanish," but with hands 
still sullenly in his pockets. It was not pleasant; 
but worse, perhaps, was the look on the face of the 
little Serb boy who brings you beer in the Kovacs. 
He was standing in the doorway, his face inde- 
scribably contorted at this glimpse of what re- 
mains of his race, fighting for life. What were 



PRISONERS AND AN AMERICAN 155 

his thoughts ? What did the future mean to him, 
if he could conceive of such a thing? 

The Vienna cabarets have missed the best ma- 
terial for their shows, indeed. And diverting sub- 
jects are not lacking there. For example, to show 
the Sarajevo tragedy, as one hears it to be, an 
agent provocateur job. The anti-Slav, Hun- 
garian Forgach, who forged the Belgrad letters 
before Bosnia was annexed, got a high place in 
the foreign office just before it. A forger will not 
hesitate at murder. Poor Franz Ferdinand be- 
lieved in consolidating his Slav peoples, which 
would have threatened current Hungarian domi- 
nance in the Empire. 

Or dramatise that old personal row between the 
German Ambassador at Vienna, when he was sta- 
tioned in Petrograd, and one of the Russian 
Grand Dukes. The first, as the prime spirit that 
made the war, rather robs Count Tisza of kudos 
in many minds, which can prove to you how per- 
sonal spats caused this whole crime of civilisation. 
And it is doubtful if Austrians will ever stage the 
following: 

Lately here in Mitrovitz a visitor, an Ameri- 
can, called on me. I live in the house of a Serb 
schoolmaster, judging from the group photo- 
graphs on the walls of this room, with its fine par- 
quet floor, huge porcelain stove, and wardrobes 



156 FIVE FRONTS 

of shiny Circassian walnut. My major domo is 
an Austrian-Serb, Gliza Miiz by name, a dynamo 
of curiosity, who is always bursting into the room 
to gaze at this typewriter as I click on — which is 
annoying, but can be borne with, as Miiz under- 
stands not a word of English. 

The visitor was Ivan Tornich, a sallow being 
with beady eyes and upright black hair on a small 
crown. He had worked for ten years in the Car- 
negie mills at South Sharon, Pa., returning to his 
Servian home only after his wife had died and 
there was no one to care for his three young chil- 
dren. Not until he had described the Servian 
bombardment of this town at the end of Septem- 
ber, how with deadly accuracy and acumen the 
coffee-house of the Hotel Merkur had been shelled 
and burnt, did I grasp him as the spiritual epitome 
of the scores of now outlawed Americans who 
have accosted me during six weeks at the Aus- 
trian front. 

Then suddenly, like a woman who has vainly 
tried to control her tears, he broke out — " I can- 
not tell you how big a heart I have for America. 
It is the finest country in the world. No man 
there takes you suddenly by the shoulder and says, 
* Who are you? Where are you going? ' He 
jumped to his feet, gesticulating. " Over there 
the Englishman, Frenchman, the Russian, all are 
the same. Each is a king. Wherever you go 



PRISONERS AND AN AMERICAN 157 

in this country, let me follow you, work for you — 
I beg." 

He controlled himself far better than I did. 
One is very far from home here. My eyes, not 
his, held a warm flood. I wondered in all that we 
ever feel toward our national melting-pot — from 
the fierce ideality begotten in ghettos to the Bour- 
bonism of caste and labour — whether any one 
had ever been hit more strongly by what America 
can mean to the alien. And except for the war, 
I should have missed this revelation of that deeper 
brotherhood rooted in the absurd word freedom. 

Tornich had to recite graphically how he had 
gotten his first job on landing in America; how he 
had reached a Pennsylvania mining town in a bliz- 
zard with only half a dollar in his pocket; how an 
utter stranger, native born, had taken him in, 
boarded him free, finally shipped him to the South 
Sharon job. 

" I did not know him," said Ivan, with a ga- 
ping admiration that ten years had left undimmed. 
" But now I know that all men who speak English 
are good — like the English whiskey, the Ameri- 
can tobacco. Ah — ! " he sighed, with a qualm 
of homesickness. " I remember the Jack John- 
son fight. I was in a saloon watching the ticker. 
How Jeffries at first winged him, so — and 
so " he made with his fists a fair Slav imita- 
tion of uppercuts. " It was too bad that he could 



158 FIVE FRONTS 

not last out, eh? And now I am here in Mitro- 
vitz, running a grocery store — like any Jew." 

The confession brought a moment as dramatic 
as any I have had on the firing-line. Gliza Miiz, 
of course, had been present all the time, disturbed 
and fidgeting that he could not comprehend a 
word we spoke, jealous and mystified over Tor- 
nich's pantomimes and passionate confidences. 
Miiz is a dark and ruddy, saturnine fellow, with 
fierce up-curled moustachios, whose ends turn back 
and touch his nose. 

All at once he left the room, slamming the door. 

" Look out for that man — for Miiz," de- 
clared Tornich. " He is no friend of mine. He 
is in the Austrian secret police ! " 

So. A " square-toe." But all I said was, 
" He is, is he? " remembering that I had been par- 
ticularly quartered on Miiz by my Austrian Ober- 
leutenant. Was I also being watched? From 
all accounts, the old Russian surveillance could 
easily take a leaf from Austrian police intrigue. 
I recollected how when I went between the lines 
around Przemysl, I was eavesdropped and shep- 
herded by Austrian officers if I spoke to the many 
Americans caught for the ranks. 

" Do not repeat anything that I have told you, 
to any one," said Tornich. " I could be put under 
arrest at any moment. I am always watched." 

I assured him. For the rest, it appeared that 



PRISONERS AND AN AMERICAN 159 

he had already done a turn in jail, for the usual 
eight weeks by which the Austrian Government 
punishes emigrants, under the excuse of " prov- 
ing " their papers, for having become American 
citizens and boasting in their old homes over the 
easy money in the U. S. A. After that time, the 
maximum for the purpose according to our treaty 
with Austria, our Embassy can protest and free 
the prisoner. But Austria never keeps them 
longer — she badgers up to the limit of interna- 
tional law. 

" I am a prisoner here in Mitrovitz now," said 
Ivan. 

" Why don't you appeal to our Ambassador in 
Vienna? We keep him there, you and I," I ex- 
plained, exactly as I had to others in Galicia, " for 
the very purpose of saving you these humilia- 
tions." 

" Write to him? " he exclaimed, laughing with 
scorn. "Write to him? He would never even 
get the letter. It would be opened, and I should 
go straight to jail. You cannot know this coun- 
try. To the Austrians, though I am as much an 
American as you are, I am still a Serb, an enemy." 

I nodded sadly. I had to, because I know that 
this is all too true. But as an American-born, who 
must feel a sort of foster-father to such folk, I 
felt ashamed. He told me about his three chil- 
dren, living with his mother in a southern Servian 



160 FIVE FRONTS 

village. He was very sure that Austrian troops 
had not yet reached it. I did not tell him what I 
had seen around Crnabara. That would have 
been useless and cruel. I only hope that his eldest 
boy, aged twelve, is still dominating his playmates 
with the slang and twang that he learned in his 
South Sharon grammar school. 

But here is the point. It is now four days since 
Tornich's visit, and I have not laid eyes on him. 
He had promised to come around the next after- 
noon. I have done everything, up to risking sus- 
picion in the Oberleutenant's eyes, to find his 
grocery store, and have always failed. A dozen 
times I have demanded that Mr. Gliza Miiz — 
good-natured square-toe that he is otherwise — 
produce him. But always there is some excuse. 
Ivan is out of town, he is not allowed on the 
streets after four in the afternoon, he has moved 
from his house to no one knows where. 

Of course, I know that he has been frightened 
into not daring to come here, if he is not actually 
behind the bars. But what can I do, except try 
to extract a certain grim and philosophic thrill 
from this touch of " Balkanism " — of the me- 
dievalism, the childish mystery, inherent in the 
shadow of the anachronistic Hapsburg realm? 
Or try to realise that this is the twentieth century, 
and that I am not in the Russia of tradition, but in 
enlightened, Germanic Austria? 



PART IV 
WITH THE GERMANS IN FLANDERS 



WORKING ROYALTY 

Lille, France, January 12. — In spite of all that 
France, Servia, and Galicia have revealed, the 
war had on a mask for me until last night. Then 
it was torn away, northwest of here, where the 
most advanced German infantry are hitting and 
being hit the hardest. I was in the front line of 
Bavarian trenches by the Ypern Canal, four miles 
south of Ypres. And I had a Mauser in my 
hands. 

But I challenge that only a man with sawdust in 
his veins would not, too, have fired then, as this 
story should prove. Also, that any one would 
have given his eye-teeth to join our hand of poker 
and the pint of champagne we cracked in that 
pitchy, noisome darkness, knee-deep muck and 
water. No precedents for civilian conduct there ! 
— on the firing line of this unending battle-siege, 
in this 400-mile-long tussle that appears to be 
the deadlock of all warfare, if not the Cross of 
civilised life. But not to mix metaphors, War 
dropped her mask merely to appear as she really 
is to-day in Flanders; to show man on the job in 
his trenches, that phase of her so jealously hidden 
by all the armies. 

163 



1 64 FIVE FRONTS 

She did show more : that horror and beauty, 
stark power, and the beat of human hearts, after 
all, may be commingled. And H. G. Wells or 
Dante did seem anaemic beside one drenched and 
glistening space we saw between those close lines, 
still heaped, after three weeks, with French 
bodies; beside the spectacle of ruin, sound, and 
ghastly lights about the Chateau of Voormezeele. 
And these things we had reached by facing heavy 
rifle fire for two long kilometres. How we were 
allowed to do this, is a matter which again deeply 
affects one's neutrality. Hitherto, when taxed 
upon that subject, I have tactfully claimed a parti- 
sanship for Servia, Flungary, and Dorsetshire 
alone. Now Bavaria goes on the list. 

For two days we had scooted around the French 
department of the Nord in royal Bayerisch motor 
cars. A flag of black and white squares bordered 
with red fluttered on our radiator, the soldier- 
chauffeur tooting a bugle-call reserved for sover- 
eignty. We scoured many empty, shot-to-pieces 
villages, such as nowadays the Sunday supple- 
ments picture. I do not mean to be trivial, but 
think that the world has extracted a full pathos 
from blasted walls. On the back seat we formed 
the " Ruin-Shy Club." We noted how dreadful 
the sufferings of the sugar-beets had been. Field 
after field strewn with them, abandoned, rotting, 
and just as they were being mobilised into heaps. 



WORKING ROYALTY 165 

We observed how country churches are always 
magnets to a fight, and that France's mortuary 
art is the one thing proof against shells and bul- 
lets. They go harmlessly clear through the 
twisted wire wreaths and china flowers of the 
graveyards. In a schoolhouse rigged as a feld- 
spital was a Christmas tree effectively decorated 
with absorbent cotton — and a poor, waxy-faced 
youth on a cot, whose blue eyes glittered, and the 
stump of his right arm stirred, as an officer pinned 
an iron cross to the blanket. 

Crown Prince Rupprecht, of Bavaria, with 
headquarters in the villa of a fugitive textile king 
of this town, was our temporary host. But we 
were guests of the General Staff of the Army, 
which, we had too cheerfully thought, intended to 
give us a whiff of powder in the west. So far, 
we had been led through a trench near Arras, over 
which a few bullets were zipping, to be told that 
the French lines were 400 yards away — hidden 
behind a grove and a country-house. We had 
had a touch of chateau life, lunching with the staff 
of a Prussian army corps, in the Marquise 

d'A 's dining-room, which has an excellent 

collection of old Dutch paintings on its walls. 
Charming fellows, they insisted that the aged lady 
held their presence a godsend, a guarantee of pro- 
tection, and that they were on the friendliest 
terms with her. She allowed them in her apart- 



1 66 FIVE FRONTS 

ment upstairs, first asking what was wanted when 
they knocked on the door. They had fitted the 
chateau with electric lights; and they saw a great 
deal of her — from the windows, as she walked 
alone in the garden. 

Still, the nearest I had come to action was on 
the night that we dined with the Crown Prince. 
He is a greyish, tall, sinewy man, with a strong 
oblong face and a long mouth that in smiling turns 
down at the corners. He is a big-game hunter, 
and we were discussing Kamchatkan mountain- 
sheep when the press-association member of our 
party interrupted. Said he, an American, bowing 
as he rubbed his hands behind his back — "And 
does your Royal Highness follow the chase as 
ardently as did your exalted father? " There was 
an old-fashioned spinning wheel behind me, such 
as the rich bourgeoisie of Lille generally have as 
symbols in their salons. I nearly kicked it over. 
And yet, two days later, either in pity or requital, 
the staff of S. K. H.'s second army corps granted 
us permission to go the limit for a night in their 
trenches on the firing line. 

How our General Staff hosts, who, so to speak, 
had orders to " hang our clothes on a hickory 
limb," fixed the matter with Berlin, I do not know. 
All through, they did their very best for us, con- 
sistent with carrying out orders. We were at 
dinner with the Prince's staff when we heard that 



WORKING ROYALTY 167 

his corps had given the " yes " over the telephone 
from their headquarters in Comines, and " with 
cheers." The idea seemed to be that since we 
had kicked so hard to see the real thing of war, 
they would offer us a bellyful of danger; and, as 
it proved, the only string tied to that was quite 
psychological, had to do with testing out our cour- 
age, or bravado, by word of mouth. The chief 
pressure for us had been brought to bear by an 
ex-Senator in the party, a born politician, who, 
though he lost his re-election last November, gets 
my vote when he runs for President. And he 
had worked through a major on the Prince's staff, 
who is connected with the family of the Evening 
Post's owners. 

So yesterday morning we started out northwest, 
with our flags and bugles, in the direction of the 
heavy artillery fire which so disturbs Lille every 
afternoon. South toward Arras all the roads and 
blasted towns had been deserted, except for an oc- 
casional motor skimming officers to and from 
trenches or corps headquarters. But here, as we 
crossed and recrossed the Lys, aswirl to its banks, 
we met all the movement and ordered turmoil 
just behind the front of an active army. I had 
seen nothing to compare with it since leaving the 
glacis outside the forts of Przemysl. Bedraggled 
infantry, off duty for their three days of rest, 
trudging with long coats dyed by trench mud to 



1 68 FIVE FRONTS 

the same colour as the khakied enemy; their re- 
lief returning more elastically, half the muck any- 
how beaten off their feldgrau, from the innumer- 
able straw-filled bunks in the big Comines power- 
house. And not one face showed strain or ill- 
health — some looked dogged, perhaps unthink- 
ing, many were pale and earth-stained under their 
tawny fuzz; but no round skull wobbled on its 
short neck, no eye was filmed or overbright. 

We edged the ditches to pass cavalry, their 
horses amazingly fit, the riders' cheeks aglow un- 
der the dull bluish covers of the helmets; or Uh- 
lans, crowned more broadly and carrying their 
lances, though without flags, deftly as riding- 
crops. But this is a time when the war sits lightly 
on horsemen, and many of them are in the 
trenches. There were landsturm, assorted as to 
age and smartness, perhaps, but in uniforms as 
yet unspoiled, and with the same swinging, busi- 
nesslike lope as the regulars. Covered supply- 
wagons creaked grittily on the rue pavee, hold- 
ing calves for slaughter — schnitzel on the hoof 
■ — and lines of black field-kitchens, like toy steam- 
rollers, catching up. Wagons were loaded with 
fresh planks for roofing bomb-proofs. A lieu- 
tenant of artillery in the doorway of the inn " Au 
Pigeon Voyageur " was wiping his eyeglasses as 
he made a speech to his men returning to their 
guns. We had plunged into the pulsing fringe 



WORKING ROYALTY 169 

of action; yet not over-looking on the curbs and 
corners of twisting village streets the staring, 
limp-clothed human relicts of a conquered peo- 
ple. 

Comines lies just across the old French frontier, 
in Belgium. We had luncheon with our generous 
corps' staff, in some residence all dark with lam- 
brequins and terra-cotta plaques. It was the usual 
officers' mess — the long table lined with mys- 
tifying uniforms, bantering one another, but care- 
fully gracious to you; boiled meats to eat, yet 
more of the wine of the country than beer. And 
that our hosts were all-Bavarian was plain from 
the captain on my right, who had been to Oxford, 
and was willing enough to admit in argument the 
social and economic dangers of a military hier- 
archy. Consider that, from a " hide-bound Ger- 
man " soldier, on the edge of battle ! 

Finishing, another one rose to say that, after 
enduring the sights of a lazarette or two, we could 
go to the field-batteries that would be full in the 
give and take of the usual afternoon bombard- 
ment. Then it would be dark, the only time de- 
cently safe for entering the trenches. " And any 
one who wants to spend the night there " — he 
winked out his eyeglass, looking about and lower- 
ing his voice, but as if he expected his messmates 
to grin while we shuddered — " will have a full 
opportunity." I felt then like a boy scout being 



170 FIVE FRONTS 

instructed in bugaboos before his first night in the 
woods. 

In the hospitals, more iron crosses were being 
distributed. Some of the white-faced, bandaged 
recipients smiled gloriously as the officer shook 
their hands. In one ward, for this was the new 
town hospital as though made to order for the in- 
vaders, we came upon the sight which always 
drives me from such places: the square white 
screen about the iron cot awaiting death. Finally, 
to the barrack-powerhouse. With the machinery 
all cleared away, the expanse divided by low plank- 
ing into 6x3 foot spaces for each man on the hard 
cement, it was like nothing less than a roadhouse 
of the early Yukon days on a huge scale. Here 
for their regular three days away from the 
trenches, the men, all with boots off, dozed on 
straw, mended clothes, wrote letters on their 
knapsacks, just as might sourdoughs in from the 
long trail, and with the same placid countenances, 
grim yet grateful. It was the life off the job of 
the hardest soldiering, perhaps, the world has ever 
known ; but it mostly impressed me with the small- 
ness of that world, of the universal sameness — 
in the prone attitudes, the facial testimonies — 
of all men under the terrible stress of effort, 
whether in the bondage of force or riches. 

Three o'clock found us threading the narrow 
streets of Houthem, the divisional headquarters, 



WORKING ROYALTY 171 

and a stage nearer the inferno of the trenches. 
Already any windows left in the village were rat- 
tling to the detonations of shrapnel; their sudden- 
spawning white plumes over the long rise west of 
the town made the woods on its crest seem alive. 
The place itself was shelled nearly every after- 
noon. A few more house-size holes in its walls 
and roof, and the brick church de l'Assomption 
would be no more. Inside it, quite two companies 
of young volunteers were at arms' exercise and 
loading-drill. Again it was to wonder how the 
war could be fought without churches. The in- 
cessant click-click-click of breech-locks under the 
shattered stained glass, the trickle of lathes and 
plaster from the imitation vaulting, mingled with 
the shouts of under-officers teaching salutes to 
youths who whirled about on their heels like me- 
chanical toys. The benches had been piled in the 
churchyard, where most of the graves were brand- 
new, with German names on their wooden crosses. 
The chancel had been shoved aside, front to the 
wall, to give room. Alone undisturbed, maybe in 
intentional irony, was a great plaster saint holding 
the infant Christ, as a Greek warrior in armour 
stretched supplicating arms to Him. 

We climbed the belfry, but only to see a shat- 
tered Norman church, with a rooster weathervane 
and a wrecked village rise from the crest of woods. 
Between and beyond these, the German cross-fire 



1 72 FIVE FRONTS 

over the invisible French trenches yonder appeared 
to meet, in white spurts like two streams of cloud 
sped from separate air-currents; and waxing 
furious, brought out a thundering answer from the 
French batteries further north. On the ground 
again by the divisional station, two soldiers came 
down the road from that quarter carrying an ele- 
gant new coffin on their shoulders. And behind 
them tooted the motor-car that had taken our of- 
ficial cinema men to the artillery up there. Ex- 
actly what had happened, the counter-insinuations 
in the pair's stories only fogged. A shrapnel 
shell — or a granate — had exploded in the air — 
or hit the ground — ten — up to a hundred — 
yards away. Somebody had dropped his machine 
and run, but some one else had skipped out first, 
while No. 2 had fled only because No. 1 wouldn't 
stand his ground while he had shouted to him, 
thought he had, et cetera. One boasted of a 
splash of mud hurled against his back, which was 
quite clean, both where he could and couldn't see 
it. They agreed only in their breathless resolve 
to hustle back to Comines, with the twenty feet 
of film that the first peep of sun in a week had 
vouchsafed them. 

Then came our turn, but we had no such luck. 
We crossed the railway line to a park of two 7.7 
pieces, behind a cover of branches stuck in the 
mud, blazing away shrapnel as fast as the range 



WORKING ROYALTY 173 

was shouted and nimble hands, each with a metal 
timing-key, could twist the scale on a shell's nose. 
I made for the cave in the embankment, where an 
officer was receiving the range from the fire-con- 
trol, who worked it out with his instruments and 
by figuring angles in the trenches themselves, some 
three kilometres forward. Just this I had so 
often seen, though in " direct " firing (yet with a 
more complicated control) at our navy's battle 
practices. But here was no play, no mere com- 
petition; like a real duel venomed with life com- 
pared to one on the stage. 

" Beide Geschiitze ! " called the lieutenant with 
the black felt of the telephone-receiver at his ear. 
" Fiinfundzwanzig, und siebenundzwanzig! " 

A private shouted this from the mud-bedded 
logs of the hut door. Peering out, with fingers 
pressed in your ears again, you saw the whole gun- 
crew standing so; then the arms of the pair kneel- 
ing at the two breeches yank back, and the snubby 
grey muzzles, forward of their armour shields, 
try to strain upward, in the dimmed thunder, from 
the parallel recoil cylinders under each. 

At each leaping blast, the shouted figures in- 
creased. Between them, I gossiped with the 
lieutenant — well as I could, for he spoke no 
English — on the optics and mathematics of the 
game. He had beady, dark eyes and a close- 
cropped moustache. For all the tension he 



174 FIVE FRONTS 

showed, I might have been talking to one of our 
ensigns, at the job of qualifying navy gunners. 

". . . Dreiunddreizig. . . . Und ein Viertel 
tiefer!" 

He sat on a carved oak chair from some 
wrecked country house, but the 'phone relay box 
was on a packing-case. There was a double hand- 
saw leaning against one mud wall, a shelf, with tea- 
cups, and a tiny, tinselled Christmas tree stuck 
high on another. In the back a bearded orderly 
slept his off-duty tour in the dusk of scattered 
straw and grimy uniform coats. 

" Wieder, Wieder! Siebenundzwanzig — 
zehn!" 

But we had fired our last that day. Artillery 
duels from permanent positions, as I once ex- 
plained, are like a chess-game; moves (firing) are 
taken in turn, to check and counter-check. Regu- 
larly this battery shelled from 3 to 5 P. M., when 
it knocked off, and the Frenchies took a whack for 
the next two hours. 

" You must go," said the lieutenant. It was 
almost five. " In an eye-wink they shoot right on 
us." 

" But you're going to stay," I objected. 

" Ah," he laughed, though his eyes fell, " but 
I must." 

Yet, in the grip of his hand on mine was not 
the least tremor or lingering. 



WORKING ROYALTY 175 

Outside, our General Staff cicerone was sum- 
moning impatiently. The gun-squad were leav- 
ing their breeches, scuttling behind a ruined brick 
estaminet for shelter. All rather a fizzle as 
yet. 

Then back in our motor at Houthem I first per- 
ceived the string tied to our freedom of the 
trenches. But it was no work of the good Ba- 
varians. 

" This afternoon, in the trench where you must 
go," said he of the General Staff, " fifteen men 
were killed by shrapnel. They shell the trenches 
all the time. They get the rifle range by day and 
shoot all night." 

Plainly he was trying to scare us out of it. 

" You must advance across three kilometres of 
open ground," he added, " always swept by heavy 
rifle fire, and by machine guns often. Men are 
killed and wounded every night going back and 
forth. You want to go? What do you say ? " 

Maybe he wanted to hide from us the disposi- 
tions of the various headquarters, or the exact 
routine of trench life. But they are all in the 
German army regulations, in print at Washing- 
ton. Or had he solicitude for our lives? But 
back in Berlin we had all carefully absolved any 
one from responsibility. He had some inscrutable 
desire to pin us down to a programme before we 
had looked the ground over. The two married 



176 FIVE FRONTS 

scribes in our party, now reduced to four, began 
very sensibly, in the native phrase of one, " pull- 
ing the wife stuff." John Reed and I pleaded in- 
decision until we saw for ourselves just what we 
must go up against. It was pitch dark then, and 
beginning to rain. 

Such tergiversations finally brought us to the 
brigade headquarters in a farmhouse parlour, 
half-way between Houthem and the village seen 
from the belfry. By the huge kitchen fireplace 
was rigged a sizable telephone exchange, tended 
by half a dozen soldier-operators. And soon as 
we saw the twinkle in the eyes of the good Bavar- 
ian colonel there, a stocky fellow with a large 
nose, Reed and I became adamant. We would 
go the limit, even blindly. We compromised 
with our General Staff host on two hours in the 
trenches, and the whole night at the regimental 
headquarters, a mile up the road, and well within 
the zone of incessant fire from the French lines. 
I still do not understand him; whether the guile 
he seemed to show was the soldier's embarrass- 
ment when sidetracked from routine, or that real 
simplicity and lack of self-assurance which so im- 
presses Englishmen in the Teuton. At any rate, 
he did not go beyond the brigade headquarters 
with us. But the married scribes were agreed for 
reaching the regimental base. 

And then began that night of nights. We 



WORKING ROYALTY 177 

started up the long road to Hollebeke village, in 
tow of a lieutenant with a square jaw and eye- 
glasses, and a bow-legged non-com. It was seven 
o'clock, drizzling hard. Ahead, over the swell- 
ing battlefield, the boom of artillery was dying fit- 
fully, only to be replaced by glimmering rocket- 
lights shot from the trenches, which, like flashes 
of greenish lightning, reticulated the torn timber 
and tottering walls of houses. The soupy mud 
was ankle deep. Momently, emerging out of the 
obscurity, we met whining provision carts, a be- 
lated field kitchen, a lone horseman with the dull 
gleam of a cigar at the apex of his great cape. A 
well-travelled road, too defiant an artery of life, 
in its ceaseless traffic to and fro, with death, de- 
feat, or victory. 

I do not know just where the rifle bullets began 
kicking around us. But until we reached the vil- 
lage they must have been spent ones, since on our 
northwest course woods and a swell of land cut off 
the French trenches to the north, though soon 
they were not a half mile away as the crow flies. 
What had been said about heavy firing all night 
on the sights got by day was true enough. But in 
all the twelve hours we were under fire I heard 
only at scattered intervals the purr of a machine 
gun or the thunder of detonating shells. 

At first now I read no menace in the wiry notes 
that entered the song of the rising wind in the tall, 



178 FIVE FRONTS 

tufty-topped poplars which made the road an ave- 
nue. 

" Please — please," came from the lieutenant, 
" to walk ten metres apart from each." 

I dropped behind the non-com., who was in the 
van, and Reed observed the thirty feet in my rear. 
Suddenly every one had stopped talking. You 
can read all sorts of fears into a stormy night un- 
der swishing branches. Certainly in the fields to 
the right bullets were striking with pops like very 
venomous firecrackers; but the taut-wire vibra- 
tions overhead were but inviting sighs, surely, in 
the concerted night-sounds of a proper front. A 
time, I reflected, when the bachelor fatalist has 
a mean advantage, less of will than tempera- 
ment. 

At last the winking rocket flashes seemed to 
push the village around us. It was as if walls had 
enclosed us in a shooting-gallery. I had been 
wrong, of course, about the sighs overhead. The 
tuck-tuck on what remained of slate roofs in that 
little lightless Pompeii — the village church's re- 
sembled black lace, exactly — cut them off in- 
stantly. That sound of steel upon slate : the first 
live note of the war I had heard, at Le Cateau in 
August, would it round things out for me as it 
strove? A knot of soldiers were getting a hand- 
out of grub, silhouettes muttering, stamping feet, 
before one candle-lit window. Then again we 



WORKING ROYALTY 179 

were in the open between the poplars, in that som- 
bre, funnel-like avenue. 

Only not the receding walls alone now raised 
the winged reports on all sides. The non-com. 
flashed his pocket light, carefully, straight down, 
making a bright circular mirror of the passing 
slate-coloured mud. I did the same with mine. 
One could end the war by taking those small elec- 
tric things from all the armies. There was a 
hedge on our right, behind a wire fence which 
twanged a bit now and then. A post got his once. 
Down our single file I heard some one stumble, ex- 
claim, and then a lot of hard breathing. The 
heavy scribe, certainly. What a time he had had 
back there in the Houthem belfry, squeezing 
around the bell! Could he fit in a trench if he 
wanted to ? I fell back to Reed, beginning some- 
how to dislike that hedge, and to talk. The 
smallest twig, you know (I said), can deflect a 
bullet at right angles, and only ten feet from a 
rifle muzzle! One had spoiled a shot I took at 
a bear last year, a cinch — 

" Rechts!" uttered the bow-legged one, cross- 
ing a plank over a ditch. A grey thing striped 
like a cat scampered across the disk of his light. 
We had turned through a broken fence. Dead 
ahead now, the soaring star of a rocket-light lit 
up the Deneckere farm, where we were, the regi- 
mental headquarters. Long low buildings made 



180 FIVE FRONTS 

a right angle pointed dead against the sweeping 
rifle-fire, and thus a shelter from it, but not, nat- 
urally, from artillery. 

The colonel's bomb-proof was dug under and 
against the nearest wing. Here a head, thrust 
from the earth, grunted a greeting as we followed 
the planks through the yard. Then down a stair- 
way carved in the soil, a drop of twelve feet or 
more, with a turn in the middle, ushered us into 
Colonel Mayer's headquarters. 

No crust of ceremony to break there ! but it 
would have been the same if the twinkling divi- 
sional colonel hadn't telephoned that we were com- 
ing. The Bavarian blue, not Prussian red, was on 
all the caps now. In that 6xi 5-foot cave my eyes 
got used to a big mirror at one end, all stuck with 
picture postcards, and behind the green shade of a 
lamp the whitest man this war has allowed me to 
know. There was something very Yankee about 
his thin mouth and iron jaw; hair greyish, but 
toothbrush moustache black, as he sat there over 
his maps. Such a personage, so encompassed, 
does not unbosom himself recklessly. We were 
more inclined to take account of ourselves first. 

11 Well, I've got my story, all I want," panted 
the heavy scribe, who had stumbled on the road. 
" That bullet about nipped me in the heel. Did 
you see? Fell flat on my face dodging it." 

" Kerr-kerr-kerr! . . . Keep-keep-keep ! . . ." 



WORKING ROYALTY 181 

came the tiny shriek in the diaphragm of the tele- 
phone receiver; but the big sergeant on duty at 
it, by the stove in the dim end of the cave, never 
relaxed his benign grin as he responded. 

" Why, these people," said Reed, who believes 
in the lawlessness of every one except the soldier, 
11 they'd wreck the Garden of Eden just to lay one 
telephone wire." 

The lighter scribe, trying all the time to smile, 
was observing, " We're awfully far front, aren't 
we? Everything I'm interested in is away back." 
He meant hospitals. He is writing a best-seller, 
with an American Red Cross doctor as the hero. 
Then the pair of them began a nervous bantering, 
as to how they might detour back to Houthem in 
the morning, to avoid that bullet-swept road. No 
trenches for them. 

The Colonel was telling us how his two regi- 
ments had since December 2 been holding this 
most forward point of the line — and so the hard- 
est beset — close south of Ypres. They de- 
fended two sections of trench, one 800 metres 
long and the other 400. They were waiting for 
the boys on their right to catch up with them. 
The last French attack had been made around 
Christmas. The enemy had advanced in close 
formation of fours, and been mown down, to a 
man, by machine guns. 

" You'll see them," he smiled at Reed and my- 



1 8z FIVE FRONTS 

self, " still heaped there between the trenches." 
This was the farm of the Chateau Voormezeele, 
where King Leopold had kept one of his mis- 
tresses. She called herself the Countess M ; 

might have been that famous one of the more 
famous hair-dressing, like as not. The old King 
was certainly a character. We would pass 
through the grounds to reach the laufgraben 
(approach trench), still a good half-mile from 
here. 

A row of bottles under the big mirror freakily 
likened the bomb-proof to a barber-shop. On one 
side of it was tacked to the plank walls a queer 
Masonic placard with the eye and sunrays, and 
" Gods et mii " beneath in archaic lettering. A 
big silvered crucifix leaned out from the other 
corner, over a coloured, Botticelli-like print of a 
woman in a bed approached by two obese angels. 
All around under the ceiling, in the gap where the 
board walls ended, spindly, waxen weeds had 
sprouted and grown high in the warmth. Of 
course there was a Christmas tree, back in the ser- 
geant's corner. Talk lapsed. The telephone's 
fitful falsetto was a thin substitute, in our sod- 
wadded silence, for the angry, curt detonations 
that filled all the darkness outside. The eye- 
glassed lieutenant and the non-com. had vanished 
somewhere. Supper was ready in the other wing 
of the farm, and above ground. 



WORKING ROYALTY 183 

We ate in the kitchen, which every day might or 
might not get its quota of shells. Where they 
had come through the roof, whole doors had been 
nailed to the ceiling. The north window had been 
straw-packed and sealed with boards, that south 
had every other pane broken in the December 
fight. A brass French cuirassier's helmet, with its 
long switch of black horse-hair, was cocked over 
a gilt mirror on the pink-striped wall paper. Be- 
tween this and the big stove, we sat down at a 
round table with white tablecloth, to a thick soup, 
beef, potato salad, and naturally, since we were in 
the hands of Munichers — 

" Der bierkeller," waved the Colonel, as one 
of the two orderlies who waited on us opened a 
closet behind him, dove in, and reappeared with 
armfuls of the black braii, every bottle in straw. 
Reed and I were taken aback. Already, to com- 
pete with the mounting geniality, we had planted 
on the table the pint of fizz that we had packed 
along to open in the trenches. At once we saw 
that hospitality would not hear of our broaching 
it. 

" When I write to my wife," said the Colonel, 
after the first " Gesundheit! " with glasses, all 
standing, " it's a lot I'll have to tell her about to- 
night." 

The English had been using the chateau as a 
headquarters when he took it. The officers had 



1 84 FIVE FRONTS 

been at dinner, scuttling away so quickly that his 
men sat down and ate the lobster mayonnaise left 
on the table. They took 218 prisoners. But 
probably Turkos were in the opposing trenches 
now — you could not tell for sure. 

And all the time the telephone on the table at 
one side was peep-peeping to keep the big sergeant 
busy, and on the other an orderly was turning 
down the covers for the night on three bedbunks 
along the wall. A bottle of anisette appeared 
with the coffee. We squeezed condensed milk 
from painter's tubes, just as we had spread butter 
on the rye bread. Cigars were passed. 

A youngster in a red cap appeared from out- 
side with a bundle of letters, the mail from corps 
headquarters, but the Colonel waved them aside 
to fill our glasses again. Two soaked young mes- 
sengers, fresh from the trenches, one in a very 
bright helmet, came in for permission to go to 
Comines. " We report that our work is done," 
they saluted, clicking heels, and were dismissed 
with a genial " Jawohl, ja." And then there en- 
tered from the same depths the being, the young 
Lieutenant, who proved to be our guide into the 
inferno. 

My first impression was of a swarthy youngster, 
hardly twenty years old, who probably had not 
shaved that morning, grabbing a glass of beer 
from the table and reporting to Colonel Mayer 



WORKING ROYALTY 185 

that the machine gun which we had heard growl- 
ing from time to time belonged to the next bri- 
gade. His black hair was brushed back from an 
exact widow's peak. I imagine that over in his 
native Munich before the war one would have 
called his face chubby; but months on the death- 
line had wholly steeled, smoothed out, that chub- 
biness, except from the round, incredulous joy in 
his eyes. His name was Riegel, but in the three 
hours we were together names counted in no phase 
of life. When, after we left the trenches, I 
learned this from the Colonel, he was rather scan- 
dalised that I asked, too, his given name; for the 
German army list recognises nothing so tender; its 
various Riegels are numbered I, 2, 3, 4, etc. 

Reed slipped the superfluous pint into his 
pocket. Riegel unpocketed a letter for the post 
with a telltale air of nonchalance. And then the 
Colonel rose to shake us much too solicitously by 
the hand. The heavy and the slight scribe were 
doing their best to appear envious, smug, and 
funny, all at the same time. 

" You know that every night we have men 
killed or wounded," said Colonel Mayer solemnly, 
" going back and forth to the laufgraben." 

Why rub it in? Could he think of no softer 
cry of wolf than our mentor of the General Staff 
had worked? 

" Too bad that you will miss our concert to- 



1 86 FIVE FRONTS 

night," the Colonel called after us. " We have 
some very fine musicians in the regiment, and a 
piano in the chateau — " 

Concert. What did he mean? Thus, fool- 
ishly puzzled, the three of us found ourselves out-- 
side again in the pelting, snapping, poisonously 
singing night. 



II 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 

The rain was sheeting down through air curi- 
ously clear. Riegel, with a warning about my 
pocket flash, rippled the circle from his own upon 
the wobbling planks leading to the highroad, and 
we were in its ankle deep grey soup once more, be- 
tween the lofty poplars. We kept our old direc- 
tion for a full quarter-mile before turning — to 
the right again — first down a cross road, finally 
into the chateau grounds. 

At first, the spell and terror of that highway, 
descending in ever louder metallic voices, concen- 
trated in this: the ceaseless stream of life it bore; 
that this stream, silent, lightless, as though lead- 
erless, should flow on through such a hellish dark- 
ness, so serene, secure. But the night was its 
compulsory time, for feeding the slaves of the 
trenches, relieving the exhausted with fresh forces, 
carrying out the dead and wounded. By day, a 
man or cart appearing on that road might forth- 
with be the hash of a 7.5. And the night, when 
artillery cannot aim, only brought a more scathing, 
microscopic blast from rifles. At the furthest the 
road here was but a half-mile from the French 

187 



1 88 FIVE FRONTS 

trenches, with the modern arm's even trajectory 
two miles. 

" Rechts gehen! Rechts gehen!" The mut- 
tered rule of the road echoed every moment. 
Two " goulash kanonen " gritted past. Hot food 
is wheeled to the very mouth of the laufgraben, 
all hands eating in the darkness of seven in the 
morning and the evening, but twice a day. A 
stretcher next, the limp form under its blanket 
rising and falling too yieldingly to the pace of his 
four bearers. A short file of privates, who 
seemed to stagger slightly — stagger, not duck. 
In the loom of a rocket their mud coats were 
ashen, their mute countenances copper-green. 
Not once did I hear an order given, see so much 
as an under-officer. The traffic was running it- 
self. The least man in the ranks knew his stunt, 
automatically. Here at last I realised to the full 
that organisation, concentration, mighty spirit — 
the feared, scoffed-at ideal of the indomitable 
German machine — its unhuman perfection, in 
duty, by discipline. 

We had turned at the crossroad, due north, 
getting the fire no longer enfilading, but straight 
in our faces. The rockets, whose glare only we 
had seen up to now, appeared as blinding green 
stars, hovering slowly, the small parachutes from 
which they hung invisible, down a clear expanse to 
the right. But ten times as persistent, blinding, as 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 189 

any photographer's calcium flash. The dripping 
trees, mud, drenched fields, swam and glinted un- 
der them as if cased beneath glass. We zig- 
zagged among great pits in the road dug by grana- 
tin. A crumbling high brick wall on the right, 
running with us and so giving no shelter, ushered 
into the chateau grounds. 

Ahead, huddled a torn mass of low buildings. 
We met a horse and driver carting cord wood. 
" For the Colonel at the farm," remarked Riegel 
casually. " But little wood for burning is left 
anywhere else." We passed under an archway 
into the open again. Close to the ground in one 
house a cellar window glowed faintly. " Field 
headquarters," said the young man, and loosening 
his arm which I held, " Sehen sie, Brucke." A 
tiny plank bridge. So ploughed here by shell-fire 
was the ground that the incessant rain had cut 
deep channels between the pits. Yet every mo- 
ment we veered around undrained ones, glossy 
ponds some eight feet in diameter. A lone sol- 
dier limped past. "Verwundet?" asked Riegel 
solicitously. " Nein." Caving-in earth in the 
trench had mashed his foot. 

Dead before us rose the chateau, or what had 
once been such a thing. Even as lit by the float- 
ing fire-balls beyond, I have now a mental image 
of it confused — Maeterlinckean. For instantly 
such an association filled me; this was the very 



i 9 o FIVE FRONTS 

country of the macabre master, the very staging he 
would conjure. Perhaps the sheen of the park 
pond, a sudden glimmer of marble limbs through 
bushes on the right, aroused it. Low, very broad 
steps mounted to a series of stately engaged col- 
umns between two shallow wings. But above, all 
was crumbling, without roof or cornice. And the 
moment's shelter it gave only served as a sound- 
ing board to the streams of bullets that it blocked. 

" Exploding bullets," said Reed. " Hear that ! 
I can't believe they're not using them." 

Then we rounded the east corner of the pile, 
for the last and hottest 200 metres between us 
and the laufgraben, sloping well down hill, sheer 
in the face of the enemy's lines, now not a thou- 
sand feet distant. 

You reasoned that the bullets, which detonated 
like loud toy torpedoes, in the mud, on trees, on 
brick, were the ones to ignore. The singing, 
zinging ones that passed you by were the devils 
that the next instant might . . . They flew like 
swarming wasps with some new sped-up, metallic 
buzzing apparatus — creatures that having begun 
a concerted assault upon you, suddenly changed 
their minds two inches from your face, and 
swerved away. Yet when the first sort pocked a 
stone a foot off, or the tree you were passing on a 
level with your eyes, they bore the more madden- 
ing, personal challenge, Then, perversely, all my 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 191 

inner, excited, and exhilarated being turned the 
more vengefully against them. 

The average, the essence of it was just that. 
And if Riegel stood it, took his chance thus night 
by night — to say nothing of his mute, peasant 
ranks — why shouldn't I ? We were all flesh and 
blood, each with but his single life to lose. Still, 
there were moments when mere anger curdled 
into a kind of giddy desperation; these, once or 
twice, before we reached the bottom, as all Flan- 
ders seemed to blaze up too clear, and yet con- 
fused around us, in the blinding emerald of the 
floating flares. Then hidden eyes in the 
" enemy's " trenches saw us, live and pallid tar- 
gets, dodging in and out among the shadows. 
Then all sounds clattered, roared up into a tumult. 

A board bridged a ditch in a thicket; we 
stumbled across, plunged down, to find ourselves 
knee deep in water, both arms outstretched on each 
side into the banked mud walls of the apprcach- 
trench. 

The Lieutenant led, then I came, then Reed. 
Standing, just our heads would show over the 
sides of the earthworks; but, since we were still 
face-to against the fire, it might seem useless to 
keep them ducked. Yet we did, for the first yards 
of floundering forward showed how the trench 
twisted, always raising against us a collar of soil. 
And that floundering! Long ago, of course, we 



1 92 FIVE FRONTS 

had doused our light. Here and there, either on 
little wooden piles or thrust into the walls, planks 
had been laid ; but our feet only felt out the wood 
to collapse with it; or stamped into the side soil 
to slip again to the ice-cold bottom. It recalled 
desperate trails I have followed in our Northern 
wilderness, though by day. This was beyond 
anything. 

You had to lunge out both fists into the mud on 
either side to keep balance. Even so, my coat 
absorbed the mud-water like a lamp-wick, the 
splashing plastered our faces, Reed's oaths be- 
hind were the right and only talk. And never 
two feet from us, through the ruff of earth, did 
those crackling reports cease, or the taut singing 
overhead. 

Suddenly Riegel chuckled. I had waded out 
from between our six-foot-wide walls, bang against 
a great muffled creature. And " Bing! " he wel- 
comed me, quite unawares, till he turned his 
bearded face, lowering the rifle from his shoulder, 
but keeping the muzzle stuck through the small 
square port in the top of the mudbank. He 
grunted something, as I tried to scramble from 
the water into the small cubicle where he stood, 
hollowed from the wall. 

" Get him ! " I said, in English. " Go to it ! " 

He kept on blazing away. 

It was the firing-line at last, all right. The 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 193 

man was only contributing his little whisper of de- 
struction to whatever neutral fools might be plash- 
ing about among chateaus and muck, a scant four 
hundred feet away — across that thin line divid- 
ing all the hates and armies of the world. After 
our long, helpless facing of invisible hundreds 
shooting against this fellow, at us, one craved a 
champion to retaliate; or merely to celebrate our 
being in one of that pair of great parallel burrows 
that to-day reaches from the North Sea to Mul- 
hausen, four hundred miles; that since the Great 
Wall of China has never had its match in history, 
and that (Heaven help us!) will never see its 
death-dealing equal. 

It was ten minutes past nine o'clock when I 
caught up with Reed and Riegel, who had turned 
to the right (east) through the flooded highway. 
At intervals, banking the outside of the walls, rose 
the flat rims of armour. Every couple of yards 
or so came just such cubicles as the first, raised 
enough above the main ditch so that the rifleman's 
knees were out of water; and each man in them, 
dogged and impassive, was firing from time to 
time. 

" They don't wait for orders," I asked Riegel, 
" but just shoot as they please? " 

He nodded. 

" And for how long at a time? " 

" Two hours on duty, then two off — to sleep 



194 FIVE FRONTS 

if they can — for thirty-six hours." ( I don't pre- 
tend to quote his German.) "Then three days' 
rest at Comines, and return. These men's relief 
comes tonight at half-past eleven." 

We had stepped up into an alcove, longer and 
drier than the others, where the firing side of the 
trench seemed to bulge outward slightly. Riegel 
lifted a flap of tent-cloth, crouching under it, and 
bade us follow. 

We found ourselves in a square cavern, a sort 
of big dog-house, some 5x9 feet in linear, but not 
four feet high. The walls were mud, except for 
boards on the entrance side, and the roof was 
black tar paper under the planking. A young 
man with deep black eyes, prominent teeth, and a 
rather startled look quite native to him, was sit- 
ting changing his socks on a flooring of straw. A 
candle burnt on a cigar-box sunk into one wall, a 
note-book beside it. Opposite him, sitting on a 
heap of coats, blankets, cowhide knapsacks, by a 
lighted stove no more than six inches across, a tall 
sergeant held a telephone, buzzing its inevitable 
" Turr-turr-turr." From a peg near by hung a 
pair of field glasses, a hunting-knife, and a felt- 
covered canteen. A bag of pink candy peeped 
from a side hole in the mud. 

A tight squeeze-in for so many of us. Riegel 
did his best to compose and unlimber us, stopping 
only, with his warm Bavarian intuition, at the ba- 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 195 

nality of introductions. His mate of the socks, 
holding up one muddy boot, stared, grinned him- 
self into greetings. Reed seized the moment to 
unpocket the fizz, and I the card deck. Neither 
one spoke English, nor ever had heard of a dis- 
sipation called poker. Still, they tumbled to our 
teaching; they would play a hand. You could tell 
by their quizzical stares, as I dealt upon the straw, 
that they felt exactly as we did the foolish joke 
of the thing. The sergeant as well, for when 
Reed had the cork out of our pint, he dug up from 
the dunnage an aluminum cup, which we filled 
and drained in turn. 

Riegel called for a new hand, Reed drew to a 
pair, the other lieutenant took three, and I two. 
I had queen, king, ace of spades, a long shot to 
fill a royal straight in tune with our other risks. 
But I failed; drew the queen of hearts, which yet 
won the hand. Riegel had nothing. Reed 
hadn't bettered his pair of trays, and our host 
threw down jacks. We were starting another 
round when the post arrived. A dripping cap 
thrust through the flap, and the same orderly who 
had brought the Colonel's mail placed a bundle of 
newspapers on the straw and vanished. There 
were Lille papers of that very morning, Diissel- 
dorf ones of the day before. From the pile the 
officer of the teeth drew a letter with very slant 
handwriting, which absorbed him, and, reflexly, 



196 FIVE FRONTS 

the rest of us for many minutes. Riegel winked 
at me with a sly unction. 

Then we gossiped, as much as the German lan- 
guage permitted Reed and myself. Several points 
about this war had to be cleared up at the point 
of the bayonet, as it were. For instance, how 
about the stories so sedulously circulated in Berlin 
that, in contrast to the rancour between the Ger- 
man and English lines, friendly notes were tossed 
across between German and French trenches? 
The pair here laughed incredulously; they had 
never heard of such a thing, and didn't think it 
likely. Only, when the last news came of 100,000 
Russian prisoners taken in the East, they had 
torn the headlines from the official communique, 
wrapped them around a stone, and flung it into the 
opposing ditch. We told them about an officer 
we had met — he had lived for two years in 
Newark — who on Christmas Day had crawled 
out of his trench and spent half an hour chatting 
with a British captain, who had crawled out of his, 
while all shooting was called off. 

That was not impossible. Always in war, just 
as the closer one comes to the fighting the fibre of 
men becomes finer, so in proportion rancour and 
prejudice against the enemy diminish. 

" If the end ever comes to this war," I said, 
" it will begin right here in the trenches." 

They nodded, amazed a bit, but seeming to find 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 197 

the idea reasonable, as if they wished it might be 
so. 

" Neither side is fighting for any idea — prin- 
ciple," I said; "but for trade, and to cover the 
blunders of chancelleries." 

" We are only defending ourselves," retorted 
Riegel, properly schooled as he was in official sen- 
timent. " Fighting for life, for our ideal of em- 
pire." 

" Idealismus," muttered Reed, who, I knew, 
was restive to get outside, and talk sociology with 
the fellows with the rifles. 

And soon outside we went, to the bitter end of 
Riegel's section of trench; into contrast as over- 
whelming, abstractly, as if, physically, we had at 
once been shot down. The mud walls of the cav- 
ern had smothered the outer tumult to the last 
whisper, inside there in a wadded silence and 
warmth. Now we were exposed again, in all 
the wild, flying, racketing, pitchy darkness of 
war. 

Once more, knee-deep in water, we slopped and 
stumbled along that crooked groove of warm hu- 
manity and death. Here and there great wooden 
reels wound with barbed wire were perched on 
top of the banks. Some rumour must have got- 
ten abroad to the silent muffled figures, firing at 
intervals from their niches, that friendly stran- 
gers were about. As we passed them, a head 



198 FIVE FRONTS 

would turn, and a hoarse voice mutter drily, with 
a sort of gleeful pride: 

" Ziinftig, nicht? . . . Ziinftig!" 

Ziinftig is upper Bavarian slang, equivalent to, 
" We're the boys, eh?" 

A huge warm paw would thrust out to seize 
and shake your hand. At intervals shallow re- 
cesses were carved under the walls and hung with 
tenting. In them the men rested for their two 
hours off duty. We pulled aside the flaps to see 
them there, sitting hunched on their hairy knap- 
sacks — there was no room to lie — leaning 
against one another like ninepins, drowsing with 
eyes shut and hairy chins on their grimed bosoms. 
Unlike the quiet General Staff trench at Arras, 
where the officers' cave was hung with Persian 
rugs, there was no jocose " Restaurant zur Wilden 
Wanze " lettered on these men's cells, as we had 
seen down there. 

" Der Herr Doktor," said Riegel, lifting a flap 
in the inner bank. And lying full length in a 
coop no bigger than a coffin, a lank, somewhat 
sallow being, the regimental surgeon, crouched up 
to greet — 

" Amerikaner? " — and confide with the in- 
stant intimacy of the pits that he knew a young 
lady over in the States. Fumbling in his knap- 
sack, he drew out a post card. It was addressed 
to Miss Annie Goerz, 1304 West Front Street, 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 199 

Plainfield, N. J., who doubtless knows without 
reading this, that his feet though often wet are 
never cold at soldiering, either. 

At length we halted where the trench seemed to 
turn away and double on itself. For some min- 
utes the green fire-globes had been soaring over 
us from all directions, close and erratic as his 
moons to Jupiter, cutting out our features, the very 
grain of the mud, with their cruel, ashen light. 
And, as always followed such irruptions, came a 
crescendo in the whirring and detonations. For 
once I both dreaded, and hoped for, a night rush- 
ing of the position, though that had not happened 
for the three weeks these men had been here. 
" Herr Tisch," said young Riegel, maybe im- 
pressed also, " is what our soldiers call the strik- 
ing bullets." Then, in a lowered voice, with a 
shy eagerness, he said: 

"You want to do something? They're only 
140 metres from here — the French Schiitzen- 
graben." 

" Yes," we answered baldly. " What? " 

For reply, he took the Mauser from the fel- 
low in the scooped place by us. The next mo- 
ment it was in my hands, with the muzzle pointing 
through the eyehole atop the bank, across that 
short and hellish space. Be it on my head, I did 
it, fired twice. 

Before each shot, Riegel, turning to a figure 



200 FIVE FRONTS 

behind him, unnoticed before, gave a sharp or- 
der. An explosion from some kind of machine 
cracked our eardrums, and the spark-dripping in- 
candescence of a rocket-light bloomed and swam 
on high. It's useless to arraign the eagerness 
with which, as in the dream which had so long 
held us, one leaped to do this. Maybe it was 
partly in retaliation to the deadly storm whiffing 
for hours around us; or in gratefulness to those 
Bavarian officers; or mostly in homage to the 
brave and patient men of the pit, a deep-reaching 
instinct of brotherhood to be, for a moment, ones 
just like them. 

As for our good President, and his warnings 
about neutrality, I will wager anything that, if 
he had been there, he would have made a good 
second. 

" Get any one? " chuckled Riegel at me. 

" Call it a couple of Turkos," I gasped. 1 
" Different from bear-shooting, this." 

" Look," murmured Riegel. 

1 The chance of hitting any one was about one in ten thousand. 
No real partisanship, naturally, influenced this impulsive yielding 
to the spirit of the fighters in the trenches. The reader will un- 
derstand that had any man been in sight I would hardly have 
deliberately aimed at him. I cannot consider, either, that my neu- 
trality, except perhaps technically, was in any way violated. It 
must be remembered that my presence in the trenches was of- 
ficially authorised by the German Government, and that I was 
subject to the orders and suggestions of its officers. 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 201 

We raised ourselves for an instant, heads and 
shoulders above the crest of the trench. 

" You can see where we have the two machine 
guns, in lead-trenches forty metres out," said Rie- 
gel, " which swept the French in their last ad- 
vance. They won't attack again while they're 
there. We're keeping them from sapping out to 
any like position." 

Yes; you beheld those two gun-shelters, a bit to 
the left, roofed like enormous bee-hives, or, rather, 
shaped like titanic porcelain insulators for high- 
power transmission. But under the shifting, 
searing light-balls, they were the least of the 
spectacle. Fifty yards to the right, too, was a 
cantilever bridge, with steelwork unhurt, across 
the Ypern Canal. The horror and climax of the 
night lay in the space between. Bodies, bodies 
unburied, unrecognisable, unless we had been told. 
Lumps of matter, like swollen sacks, in hundreds, 
scattered haphazard upon one another, heaped 
like sacks. Without visible flesh or clothing; all 
mud-coloured, drenched, gleaming terribly with 
the slimy pallor, like verdigris, of that awful 
field. It resembled a vision under sea; as if one 
saw through a green translucence the encrusted 
toll of some old disaster. . . . Life might exist 
for, might endure, even justify all manner of 
deeds, purposes, monstrous perversities — but not 
such as these, not that. . . . 



202 FIVE FRONTS 

Back to the officers' cave we sloshed, and to 
bottled beer, be it not forgotten. It was after 
eleven o'clock. The sergeant by the stove clapped 
the telephone to my ear. Distinct and far away 
I could hear the tinkle-tinkle of a piano. So that 
was what the Colonel had meant by the " concert," 
which we were not missing, after all. Some one 
was playing down in the divisional headquarters, 
at the lower farmhouse — the Chopin waltz in A 
flat, I recognised, as a drip from the tar-paper 
overhead trickled down my back. 

Soon we started stumbling and wading out to- 
ward the chateau, I being the last to leave the 
shelter. Alone a moment with the sergeant, he 
pulled me back by the shoulder, fumbled in his 
knapsack. Silently he opened under my eyes a 
little black jewel case which held some golden 
Bavarian decoration, and his iron cross. Then 
he handed me the deuce of clubs, which I had 
dropped from the card deck. 

Emerging from the pit, crossing the little 
bridge, passing the torn wrought-iron gates into 
the noisome and ghostly chateau grounds, I had 
exactly the feeling of a mountain-climber who 
has won a perilous apex, only to face the more 
dangerous descent. Reed showed a splash of 
mud on his right cheek, made by a Mr. Tisch's 
landing on the trench-top at a level with his head. 
But it was by the crumbling pillars of the chateau, 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 203 

the glimmering marbles of the pond, that I first 
began trying to dissect the secret of the order, au- 
tomatism, concentration, the grave, stolid spirit 
in this small section of the great German machine 
at its job, that we had glimpsed. It was magnif- 
icent. What was its key? 

The game of death no more tensed any one's 
nerves than its routine seemed to bore them. Is 
the German divinely, or devilishly, gifted above 
other peoples for this business of fighting? He is 
no Oriental, no fatalist; nor, with his sentimen- 
talism and introspection, can he momentarily love 
fighting for its own sake, as do the Celts and the 
English. Could it be patriotism, discipline, alone? 
Nothing else seemed left. And if it were these, 
then they have been carried to some wth power, 
beyond the grasp of men who do not know the 
soul of this race as their own. 

Riegel led us down to the field headquarters, 
where we had seen the glow in the cellar window. 
" Les caves du chateau," welcomed the genial 
major there, rising from his brass kerosene lamp, 
with a gesture at the ranks of empty shelves where 
wine had been stored. That very afternoon a 
granate had burst through the window and taken 
the foot off his bed. The customary orderly, at 
the regulation telephone, sat in a Louis Quinze 
chair. A gilt Directoire mirror reflected our 
faces, and my trousers were muddying pink bro- 



204 FIVE FRONTS 

cade. Next to the atrocities on sugar-beets in the 
war, my heart bleeds most for the violated dignity 
of whole antique-shops-full of " art " furniture. 
As we left, there breezed in to go on duty, night 
glasses about his neck and code-book in hand, a 
student-like captain with eye-glasses — the only 
officer we met who did not seem to accept us with- 
out reserve. His eyes searched us with such 
estimation and doubt that I hold he was no Ba- 
varian. 

In the road outside the grounds we passed the 
night relief for the trenches. They came down 
between the inky avenue of poplars, in single file, 
muffled, bent forward, huge-booted. Except for 
the guttural " Rechts gehen ! " of the under-officer 
leading, there was not a word, not a salute, as 
they vanished on by the hundreds with shouldered 
rifles and a stiff, swishing sound of clothing, to 
that next cycle of their tragic routine, which might 
always be their last. Then a couple of belated 
goulash kanonen, and we were turning in at the 
farm gate. 

Outside the kitchen door, rose a three-foot heap 
of beer bottles. The thin scribe and the stout 
scribe, still sitting at the white supper table, asked 
us to show our iron crosses; but they had no vain 
hindsight to declare that, as things had turned out, 
they wished now that they had gone with us. The 
Colonel's concert was over, the men of his post 



NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES 205 

who had been playing on harmonicas and hand- 
made guitars strung with telephone wire having 
turned in. But the telephone rang up to an- 
nounce " Parsifal," this time played from the 
very hall of the chateau. The artist was the 
Hauptmann commanding one of the two trench 
machine-guns, a lawyer in peace times. At this 
nightly diversion by the regiment of connecting 
up all the field telephones, we had heard a general 
and two colonels perform musical acts, at least not 
very cruel. 

Between numbers, the Colonel would cut off the 
line to ring up a trench, as one might call central 
to ask the time of night. And you heard this: 

Col. M. (sipping his anisette) — " Ich muss die 
Verluste wissen." 

Orderly (repeating from 'phone) — " Drei totd 
und drei verwundet." 

Col. M.— "Gefangene?" 

Orderly— " Nichts." 

And so forth. It appeared that his two regi- 
ments were three ammunition wagons and four 
French officers to the good that day. Their aver- 
age daily losses were seldom more than a dozen, 
these piping times. And then came a message 
from headquarters which caused the good man to 
cross his legs on the other side — but no more. I 
did not understand all of it, but it was to this ef- 
fect: Information had been received of a general 



206 FIVE FRONTS 

shifting of the enemy's personnel all along the 
line. Each regiment must ascertain and report 
the character and number of the troops directly 
opposed to it. 

Did it mean a coming attack? Who could tell? 
Colonel Mayer shrugged. At I A. M. we all 
turned in on the bunks along the wall, except 
Riegel, who had vanished down to the corps' 
base for his three days' breathing spell. 



Ill 



CONQUERED FRANCE 

Brussels, January 17. — Never before, in the 
opinion of her cafes, has Brussels at this season 
been so gay. Uniforms, uniforms everywhere, 
and plenty to eat and drink at standard prices — 
in the cafes. Plenty of American relief here, 
though the section of France German-ruled has 
none of it, and presents a very different picture. 
Here citizens have recovered from their pride or 
fright or dummheit or whatever the Germans 
would call it. General von Bissing, Military Gov- 
ernor, that steel-eyed man, whose eyes are yet the 
most penetrable part of him, bangs a fist on the 
table and exclaims, " Pin-pricks! " to any fuss his 
subject people might make now. Bars " close " 
at 10 P. M., but roaring " speak-easies " have their 
doors swinging into the small hours. The sol- 
diery on duty tour them from time to time, to keep 
tabs on their friends. 

This sounds superficial, cynical. It is, but in- 
evitably, as will appear. As guest of the Ger- 
man General Staff, I am surfeited with hospitality, 
guided by its officers in motor cars, told what I 
cannot do and can do, according to a rigid pro- 

207 



208 FIVE FRONTS 

gramme from which escape is almost impossible. 
The Bishop of Malines, for instance, must not be 
approached. His famous interview is a thing we 
speak of in whispers, passing a copy of it, sup- 
pressed here, but which we secured no matter how, 
furtively from hand to hand under our table in the 
Palace Hotel. 

For three months, a twenty-fifth part of France 
has been occupied by German armies. Most of 
this area and of Belgium has been possessed from 
the beginning of September, six weeks longer. In 
all of it, civic administration, the welfare of the 
civil population, has been in the hands of the in- 
vaders during that time. I am finishing a journey 
from end to end of this conquered territory, just 
behind the lines. 

Traditionally the conquerors here should be 
hated with a passion unmatched between any two 
other peoples in the world. The neutral travels 
with eyes and ears open and hopeful for any hint 
of solidarity between soldiers and populace — for 
any straw of human feeling to relieve a situation 
inevitably dark. 

I have been disappointed. Slight insight into 
the Prussian temperament in the role of victor 
makes clear enough that the plight or good for- 
tune of an enchained population rates nothing as 
compared to the triumphal feats of German arms 
as shown in ruins, ruins, and again ruins; with a 



CONQUERED FRANCE 209 

day's diversion to look at concrete bridge-building. 

Still, straws of emotion have been left out to 
grasp; it could not be otherwise, where life is so 
tense, unparalleled, uncertain. 

A week ago, as we were threading the narrow 
streets of Namur, under the forts which were cap- 
tured so quickly, because the Belgian General 
Michel failed to relieve them, a well-dressed 
woman standing on a corner called after our car: 

"Bodies! Sacres bodies!" The word is in- 
sulting French slang for the Germans. We were 
identified with them, were of them, their friends. 
Reporters sent thus to the front (sic) before had 
taken care to tell me that no ill-feeling existed be- 
tween the Belgian populace and the Germans; but 
that it was " dangerous to talk English " in Bel- 
gium, its people being angry that England had 
not more quickly come to their aid. In Germany 
favours have been granted certain press associa- 
tion men, who primarily value " interviews," or 
who for other reasons are partisan. 

After luncheon that day we were convoyed, not 
to see the Namur forts — being rebuilt with Bel- 
gian labour, and so far too interesting for our eyes 
— but to the site of a conventional churchyard 
fight on a hill. Given liberty afoot for a while, 
I lagged behind our uniformed hosts. 

" There's more of them," said a workman in a 
long coat, jabbing a thumb toward us, to his com- 



210 FIVE FRONTS 

panion. " They're all the same," he satisfied his 
scrutiny, puzzled that we wore no uniforms. Two 
girls came along, one carrying a shopping net full 
of packages. Politely I lifted my hat; the pair 
surely heard me beg pardon, declare myself an 
American. Yet, how, indeed, could that be, 
judged by the company I was in? They tore past 
with a repudiating mutter, heads sullenly thrown 
back, and I heard the thin one with the raven hair 
snort. 

Yet that very moment we were facing the re- 
verse of the medal; and one's hat had to come off, 
in the admiration which has not once relaxed these 
ten days, at the physical order, organisation, fore- 
sight, and thrift of the conquerors. Everywhere 
they have enrolled the unemployed to till deserted 
land. They are replacing the wrecked, old-fash- 
ioned French railway bridges of brick arches with 
steel and concrete. They have built cut-offs, sid- 
ings, new permanent ways with standard grades 
and heavy rails — all the work of their pioneers. 
In the miserable hotel at Charleville, where we 
spent our first night in France, they had put in 
steam heat, the first hotel so equipped, I wager, in 
all the French provinces. One may rage that the 
Germans invade like Huns, which I for one deny, 
but they are remaining like Romans, as if they 
had come to stay. 

There outside Namur, a horde of stoop-shoul- 



CONQUERED FRANCE 211 

dered civilians, each with a red band on his arm, 
was crowding before the pay-window of a brick 
building. Judge the number of workmen em- 
ployed here by the figures on the arm-band of one 
that brushed past us; he was No. 3398. To keep 
them from starving, they were being paid half in 
money, half in bread, for work on the forts — 
to be used against the Allies in the chance of their 
advance. " And they are glad to be employed 
so," said our officer, really convinced of the truth 
of his idea. 

That morning we stopped in Givet, France, the 
first town in the republic directly in the path of 
the German armies that passed through Namur. 
Here the fighting lasted four days, some 67,000 
invaders attacking its fortress on the Meuse. We 
were shown over it, and before mounting the 
glacis to see the thirty-foot holes — through old 
brickwork — of 30.5 siege-guns, our General Staff 
cicerone said: " This is an example of the most 
modern style of fortification." Half an hour's 
wading through its debris only proved that no 
work of defensive construction had been done 
here since the dates over the casement arches, of 
which none was later than the '70's. " A big-gun 
platform," he continued, pointing to a squared 
space. " Of cement, of course," I said, " but 
wljere is it now? " " Ah, it has been removed 
with the gun." (!) A fellow-scribe, on his first 



2i2 FIVE FRONTS 

lap of war work, kicked one of those ancient, solid 
cannonballs such as at home we heap around our 
soldier-and-sailor village monuments. " Why, 
hand grenade," said he. " Yes, a hand grenade," 
agreed the officer. And no one laughed — until 
two of us tried to lift it and couldn't. 

You cannot think this deception, you hate to 
believe it ignorance. In all politeness, you could 
but congratulate the War Office that no valuable 
secrets would be given away to foreigners, this 
trip. Only, and I think justly, one may feel his 
amour propre stung. You would like to yield 
place to the ghost of Mark Twain, which, not 
having followed (I hope) the war for five 
months, might extract something beside ennui and 
pity from the monotony of ruined dwellings and 
small shops. But we did see the dynamited 
arches across the Meuse that have figured va- 
riously in publications as " Bridge at Liege," or 
" Blown up by the British at Compiegne." And 
the town hall, which you have seen portrayed to 
be " The Linen Exchange at Louvain," and, 
equally, " Bishop's Palace at Malines." 

At the Hauptquartier in Charleville we messed 
in the railway buffet with engineer officers repair- 
ing railways and bridges. Here it was significant 
and heartening to find, as one always does in the 
ratio that he approaches the firing-line, a lapse in 
rancour toward the enemy, especially that fostered 



CONQUERED FRANCE 213 

by the inspired rumour and press of the capital. 
This policy has been to sustain hate of the Eng- 
lish by offsetting against it pity for the French, 
and repeating tales of mordant tolerance between 
Germans and French in the trenches. Our Ba- 
varian colonel at the Deneckere farm laughed at 
tales of friendly, signal spade-raising from the 
trenches (phosphorescent spades at night). 
Here, too, such facts were unheard of. The 
major next me at dinner smiled when I told him 
of the sentimental letters, featured in the Berlin 
papers, written by Frenchwomen to German 
officers who had been quartered in their houses. 

" There may be single instances of that," he 
said, with true Prussian candour. " Now, I take 
tea nearly every afternoon with Monsieur le 
Maire of this town. But one does not need to 
be told how any population really feels towards 
us. Of course, of course," he nodded broadly, 
" we know. . . ." 

Civil administration and the local gendarmerie 
remain as before in all communes, though subject 
to the officer in command. This is the military 
custom for all subject civilised peoples, and we 
ourselves followed it lately, when in possession of 
Vera Cruz. From Charleville half the popula- 
tion had fled before the invading armies, on ru- 
mours of " atrocities " circulated by the Belgian 
refugees in September, and had not yet returned 



2i 4 FIVE FRONTS 

— could not, naturally. This seemed to be the 
true figure for the smaller towns in conquered 
France, especially in the region south of Givet 
and Longwy. A smaller proportion left the 
cities; in the Arras region most villages were ut- 
terly abandoned and in ruins, having been the ac- 
tual scenes of fighting — it is a habit of the French 
to place their artillery in town squares — taken 
and retaken several times. But France itself 
shows little damage wreaked because of franc- 
tireurs, and officers continually compliment the 
" sense " of French civilians in not defending their 
homes. This in contrast to the never-to-be-for- 
given Belgians. 

" But this is a time," my major said, " when 
only the criminals, the Apaches, of a town return. 
In some way they sneak across the lines. They 
come to cajole or steal the pay out of the men 
working for us. We hand them over for punish- 
ment to their own gendarmerie." 

That set me wondering. Even an Apache may 
be a patriot, and seizing German coin from his 
fellow-citizens — must that be unalterably crim- 
ial? 

We walked back together to our steam-heated 
hotel, whose proprietor talked German too much 
and too well, was too spry and prosperous, to 
seem to me a loyal Gaul. His young son had 
just burnt a hand on the new chauffage. But op- 



CONQUERED FRANCE 215 

posite the station in the darkness a small park 
was wholly railed off with horizontal black, red, 
and white banded poles. Sentries with breast 
shields bearing an eagle on a sky-blue field stood 
by their little black-and-white zigzagged sentry 
boxes, which, together with the opening of in- 
numerable cigar-stores, are the chief visual brand 
of Teutonic occupation the land over. One house 
there, though it was almost midnight, still blazed 
with lighted windows. 

" Our Emperor's field-quarters. He is there," 
said the major in a low voice, as though confid- 
ing a stupendous and secret fact; and, come to 
think of it, no one had hinted of his presence in 
the town until now, when we had all done justice 
to the tank car of beer arrived from Munich that 
afternoon. " And the Chanchellor is naturally 
there, also." 

We strolled through the utterly void and quiet 
streets. Eight o'clock saw all citizens indoors, by 
regulation. One had not even to look at the signs 
to know that the wide avenue with the sycamores 
was named after the local church's saint, and that 
the shops were " Le Magasin du Louvre " — or 
" de Paris." You knew that the square with the 
very chic and up-to-date statue of the republican 
goddess, where the high and perfect gables of six 
Louis Treize houses cut the clear sky, was the 
" Place de la Republique " — or " Constitution." 



216 FIVE FRONTS 

The town verily smelt of France. And then from 
the open door of a cafe, where we had seen plac- 
ards advertising that same Munich cargo, came 
harsh voices, guttural sch sounds; spurs clattered 
on the cobbles, spiked helmets glinted. Some- 
how, before those silent, sleeping — or sleepless? 
— French homes I was reminded of the change- 
lings of northern folk-lore, of the troll-babies 
thrust into village cradles, who grow up in a week 
and crowd out, starve, the peasants' babes. How 
else did they feel behind those shuttered windows, 
the soft and proud, thrifty and impotent, old 
men and girls and youngsters of a subject peo- 
ple? . . . 

We had entered conquered France from Metz 
by rail. The change from Germany, through 
captive Lorraine, to yoked France herself, was 
impressive by a very lack of drama, in the cold 
mists and rain enveloping the Vosges. Wire en- 
tanglements outside the great fortress were the 
first marks of war; then captured Belgian cars, ad- 
vertisements of aperitifs; a paler, more rambling 
architecture, ampler windows, innumerable Ger- 
man flags, and the flat, pink and fattish faces of 
soldiers in red caps, in helmets, close to the car 
windows or bursting their striped sentry boxes. 
Tunnels wrecked by the retreating French, under 
repair by the constructive Germans, glowed with 
gasolene flares. The cold and blooding Meuse 



CONQUERED FRANCE 217 

covered the dark, swampy meadows of Sedan. 
Limp and spiritless loiterers, old women, meek- 
faced men, appeared fitfully in the passing vil- 
lages, with their mossy tiles and curiously soulless 
streets. In just such towns last August I had seen 
in full flood, before the advancing von Kluck, 
this people's terrified flight before the march of 
war. But now the deeds were done, the exodus 
ended. You saw no burgeoning mothers wildly 
pushing carts that toppled with chairs and bed- 
ding, nor kiddies nursing kittens in their cloaks, 
none knowing whither they were bound. Only 
the unfit, the incapacitated by fortune and spirit, 
had remained. And as the Prussian train rolled 
on, an officer, pointing to some house or factory 
which by miracle had missed ruin along the way, 
would say, with a satisfied unction: 

" That one, you see, it was not necessary for 
us to destroy." 

The day we left the Emperor's headquarters, 
again travelling by rail, was a big one in the way 
of bridges. Six of them, spanning the wide 
gorges of tiny streams in the Ardennes we were 
led out to admire, and by implication the engi- 
neer officers and pioneers rebuilding them; though 
German firms supply the material by contract. 
There was no escape, no chance for a word with 
the appealing sodden natives on road or street be- 
low our giddy revetments. The grotesquest day 



218 FIVE FRONTS 

ever known in the job of war-reporting. Never 
again can I look a bridge in the face without cal- 
culating where in its girders the holes for dyna- 
miting it " in case of retreat " should be bored. 
Never have I been so filled with admiration for 
how military men — I mean our hosts — can dis- 
semble their boredom and choke their sense of hu- 
mour, when acting strictly under instructions. 

That night after we reached Lille, that enthu- 
siasm wilted a bit. The boom of artillery in the 
direction of the English Armentieres met us at the 
railway station; also a motor car of the Crown 
Prince of Bavaria's staff, with an aid who had a 
sword-cut on his face and smelt of violet sachet. 
We skirted a block all in ruins by the station, and 
the only war damage that is conspicuous in Lille, 
and were put up at the Hotel de L'Europe. Ex- 
cept for the manager of the International Har- 
vester plant in the suburb of Roubaix, only Ger- 
man officers lived there. Among them, when I 
came down to dinner, a round-headed, dapper lit- 
tle Hauptmann with the sort of beard that is en- 
couraged to hide no chin was seated in a wicker 
chair. Suddenly he began mumbling something, 
then exclaiming. It certainly sounded offensive, 
but it was minutes before I realised that his epi- 
thets were directed at me. 

"Schwein! Schwein ! " he uttered furiously 
under his breath, the phrase which in Germany 



CONQUERED FRANCE 219 

equals the genealogical fling that you must use 
smiling in Montana. 

Mind, I had not opened my mouth, spoken a 
word in any language, though I was wearing 
khaki trousers. I first got wind of what was up 
from indignant members of our party, one of 
whom began scorning me for not sailing in with 
my fists. At this another, who has lived in Ger- 
many, asked with a white face if we all wanted 
swords through our bellies, for assaulting a Ger- 
man officer under military law. The other uni- 
forms now ignoringly crept away, as if washing 
their hands of the affair. And we gathered so 
close and interestedly around the little fellow, who 
had shut up — that he rose and left, too. 

How word got to our General Staff cicerone, 
I do not know; it naturally had to, and quickly. 
Soon back came the dapper one, and, quite as I 
expected, began apologising. 

He said that lately he had spotted a lot of 
English spies — that seemed to be his metier — 
and had thought I was English. Besides, he was 
very tired and nervous from overwork. All of 
which was to be accepted as graciously as one 
could. Then I tucked in : 

" If you thought that I was a spy, why didn't 
you report me to the proper authorities — in- 
stead of going out of your way to insult me? " 

He pretended not to hear, and was off again, 



220 FIVE FRONTS 

sincerely hurt and sorry, I am sure, for his mis- 
take. 

But what is one to think, how is one to act, if 
such incidents are possible, when you are a guest 
of this army's? To put it mildly, What is the 
acid test for a once-sympathetic neutrality? 



IV 

GERMAN SWORD AND GALLIC SOUL 

You gladly escaped to mingle with the subject 
populace of Lille, though warned that it was " bet- 
ter " to loaf in the hotel. 

Three days spent thus with open eyes and ears 
left me with the acutest memory of the office of 
Monsieur le Maire. He himself was not visible, 
and had he been, in the anomalous position of still 
holding all his vested authority, he could not have 
felt himself so free to talk as his assistant, whom 
I did see finally. Soldiers in spiked helmets, 
clinking spurs, stamped through the mediaeval 
mairie with requisition " bons " from their officers 
for him to sign, commandeering here a factory or 
there a wineglass. The long corridor was hung 
with portraits of all the city's mayors, in ermine 
and military medals when France was imperial, 
in stern frock coats for republican times, epitomis- 
ing her quixotic history. 

It was not easy to win this assistant's confidence, 
seated under the gloomy lambrequins of Gallic 
officialdom. And never have I seen a man so 
nervously worn, so hopeless and pallid as he, with 
such dire circles about his small black eyes. But 



222 FIVE FRONTS 

like any Frenchman under stress of real emotion 
he coldly held himself to facts and figures. Lille 
was the largest city of the richest manufacturing 
district in France, the centre of all its textile in- 
dustry. It had with the suburbs of Tourcoing and 
Roubaix a million people. Since the German oc- 
cupation on October 13, Lille had paid 12,500,000 
francs in aid to inhabitants and — levies to the in- 
vaders. One quarter of the million had nothing 
absolutely to eat. The city was at the end of its 
string; it had not a sou left. 

" The outlook is very black," murmured the 
official. " We do not know what will happen. 
We see no hope except starvation. Your Ameri- 
can relief for Belgium is needed here a hundred 
times more." 

As if to twist the buried knife, Lille was pay- 
ing both the wages of the men working on the 
new fortifications, and for quartering officers and 
troops on the population, the latter at this rate: 
10 francs a day for officers, 7 for non-commis- 
sioned officers, 3 for privates. 

" Practically, then, they are taking cash from 
citizens? " 

" Yes. But it is the custom of invaders, their 
military right." 

" Speak freely. Have they committed any ex- 
cesses? " 

" They have acted," he answered, without a 



GERMAN SWORD 223 

quiver or reproach — but, Oh ! how the words cut 
— " according to their lights. You cannot expect 
us to be in love with them." 

" Yet many of your factories still are running? " 

" Oh, yes." 

I asked the truth of the story current among 
the inhabitants that the Germans had requisitioned 
all the flour with bons (to be paid after the 
war and by the French no matter which side won) , 
and then sold back the part of it that was spoiled 
at double the price paid on paper, and for cash. 

" It is true. The city had to buy the spoiled 
flour and distribute it gratis to the bakers. This 
in order to keep down the price of bread, for the 
Germans had demanded of the bakers an exorbi- 
tant charge for the rotten stuff." 

But one must ever bear in mind the right of 
the military, within humane and civilised bounds, 
to consider first its own exigencies; and to ask 
yourself in hearing of oppressions or " injustices " : 
If these officers were Frenchmen, ruling a like sec- 
tion of conquered Germany, would their acts be 
any less high-handed? It would be as easy from 
talking with German officers to justify their meas- 
ures as, by listening solely to civilians, to condemn 
all in a blind sympathy for them. Still, a neu- 
tral's instinctive sympathy is with the under dog, 
and thereabout France was that canine. For all 
denials of military men that soldiers have no feel- 



224 FIVE FRONTS 

ing against non-combatants, the latter are natur- 
ally venomous toward them. 

We cruised furtively about town. German offi- 
cers met us with stares, but never demanded our 
right to be there, so confident were they in the 
effectiveness of their regulations. I wore the grey 
Austrian army cap that I was required to don in 
Przemysl, and often it brought me salutes. Once 
two officers, who must have spent their last leave 
in Vienna, nearly climbed out of a cafe to greet 
me, calling " Servus ! " But not so the privates, 
perhaps because of the red notices posted every- 
where — " Achtung ! Soldaten ! " — warning them 
to be wary of spies and not friendly to strangers. 
Now and then one clattered up behind you, asked 
a quick question in German; but since I always an- 
swered in the same language, he would slink away, 
satisfied. 

Huge requisition notices in French were posted 
everywhere, headed " A la population," signed 
by the Kommandateur. A yellow, Kriegsnach- 
richten placard detailed the losses in hundred 
thousands of each of the Allies, but with no men- 
tion of the million and a quarter Germans to date 
hors de combat. A horrible example this, sup- 
posedly, which loiterers raised shoulders and 
smiled knowingly before; really, an instance of 
Prussian crudity in stirring apprehension. The 
latest decree ordered all persons owning more than 



GERMAN SWORD 225 

100 kilos of food to report the fact, for purposes 
of requisition, plainly: one wondered how Ameri- 
can relief would fare. Another " cancelled " 
French mobilisation orders, directing all men of 
military age to report at headquarters, under 
heavy penalty for disobedience or for any one 
who " concealed a mobilisable." Smart scheme 
for listing workers for use in trenches and on 
gun platforms. 

A bony horse and dilapidated cart loaded with 
coal staggered through the main square. Half a 
dozen women, dressed and stooping like beggars, 
followed it holding sacks to catch the dust that 
trickled down. Nothing like that in France, you 
reflected, since the Commune. In the doorway of 
a shoestore, where I had bought puttees, a grey 
dame sat knitting, which carried one further back 
into history, via Charles Dickens. 

" Go and watch where the coal is distributed," 
croaked she. " The soldiers pass by. They 
laugh and jeer at the poor women." 

The goodwill of this one, who with her two 
friends whispering at the stove inside were the 
bitterest, most fatalistic folk I found in Lille, had 
been hard to win. An American, indeed, was I? 
How could that be, if I were here convoyed by 
German officers? She had never heard that 
Americans, too, were savages. Hein! 

" You ask about the English prisoners? How 



226 FIVE FRONTS 

are they treated?" repeated she. "The people 
are allowed to give food to the French, the 
Hindus, when they pass through here. But noth- 
ing to the English. A baker will run out to a 
company of them, offering bread. But before 
they can take it, German soldiers have rushed up 
and spit on it." 

This was the only slur on privates or officers, 
of many heard there, that I could find generally 
confirmed. The characteristic French generosity 
the story showed gave it weight. To every reason 
that I cited, for German actions as customary or 
inevitable in conquered territory, she challenged 
me, her bloodshot eyes narrowing with suspi- 
cion — 

" Vous pensez, hein? Vous pensez?" 

When suddenly the afternoon concert of artil- 
lery began to roar, she faced me with that grim- 
ness of her race which at its blackest never loses 
cheer and wit: 

" You think that it is our soldiers who are re- 
turning? Well, I do not," and she sucked in a 
corner of her mouth, tigerishly, " — not just 
yet!" 

The ladies of an epicerie, where I bought a 
hare pate to take to the trenches, were in the 
shrugging mood of resignation, desperate only on 
mention of their friends' food supply. They told 
with a rattling humour and pride in their nerve, 



GERMAN SWORD 227 

how they had hidden in cellars, shifted for them- 
selves during the somewhat comic bombardment 
of October. Like all, they had parents, hus- 
bands, in their beloved land across the awful news- 
effacing lines of battle. Months had separated 
them, death seemed the likeliest portion of the ab- 
sent, yet they ill concealed an envy of them. They 
gave me addresses of sisters, brothers, begged me 
to intercede with my German hosts to let them 
send letters. When I did, the officers laughed. 

In the cafes you encountered domino-playing 
business men, who thawed on hearing you speak, 
as they would say, " without a German accent." 
A hat-dealer with a paunch and blond moustache, 
was quite settled down to the situation, " tempo- 
raire " he said, and took a strategic interest in the 
shifting scenes of fighting. He drew a worn map 
from his pocket to point out the towns from Nieu- 
port south, through Ypres, Armentieres, Peronne, 
Lens, Arras, and told them off as " Anglais," 
" Frangais," or " ne sais pas." He dwelt upon the 
protean marvel that in an hour any one could walk 
from Lille straight into trench or artillery duel. 
He was far more interested that in the bombard- 
ment 1,200 houses and 300 million francs in prop- 
erty had been destroyed, than that folks should be 
starving — heartless bourgeois with a well-stocked 
cellar that he was. 

The pale, snub-nosed lady at a friseur's where I 



228 FIVE FRONTS 

bought soap had last seen her son when he mobil- 
ised on August 2d, her husband when his " year " 
was listed and he went to Tours in September. 
Not a word from either since. The invariable 
story. What could one say, what sort of hope 
hold out? What to conjecture that she had not 
a thousand times passionately rehearsed, or that 
spoken by an alien would not sound banal and hol- 
low? 

" It is sad for you," I stumbled. 

"Naturally!" she exclaimed with the first 
fierceness in our talk. And as we discussed the 
chances of her people's retaking Lille, she kept 
repeating with eloquent intonations and as if 
slightly dazed — "Enfin ... Et enfin! . . . 
Enfin?" 

A tobacconist's wife set her mouth and hinted 
dramatically of civil mutiny, if things continued as 
they were. The women of France, said she, had 
before saved its liberties with knife and blood- 
shed. 

The girls in a droguerie where I was telephon- 
ing gave the one ray of cheer. One of them 
boldly wore the dull bronze arms from an English 
soldier's cap. "Ah! Les Anglais," her brown 
eyes glittered, and by the deep sigh she heaved, I 
knew that she was thinking less of their military 
worth than of one Tommy who had owned the 
token on her breast. 



GERMAN SWORD 229 

The local newspaper published, Sous le controle 
de V autor it e allemande, was edited by a Madame 
Tersaud. Its articles ranged from discussing 
laisser-passer regulations to " La Question du 
Pain," which concerned the German persecution 
by which the people had to eat rye bread, his- 
torically scorned in wheat-nourished France. 
But you could also find in it, to show how life was 
not changed altogether and that the French can- 
not lose their unconscious gift of making us bar- 
barians smile, this notice : 

Chien perdu. II a ete perdu un chien tigre repondant 
au nom de Phillipe, le ramener Rue de Long-Pot. 
Recompense. 

Another sought a gentleman escaped from a 
local insane asylum, and thought to be at large 
between the lines. It suggested that scene in Ib- 
sen's " Peer Gynt," where the keepers of the mad- 
house are kept in cages and the lunatics set free. 

It was a relief to quit Lille and visit the invaders 
at their best, at their outlying messes or in the 
trenches. The courtyard of your hotel roared 
with chugging motors just before daylight, exactly 
as had been at Przemysl. It was the safest time 
to shift reliefs, and a car skimmed you under the 
dawn moon and through showers upon winter 
wheat fields, among the towns around Arras, 
wrecked with a relentless finality that only Servia 



230 FIVE FRONTS 

can match. You reached a trench, passing 
through shell-torn wall after wall of houses in the 
ghastly village of Tilloy. Here one fellow with 
a tiny mouth and puckered moustache peered from 
his cave, by a home-made periscope of mirrors 
tilted in a square wooden chute, to grasp my hand 
and confide, " My mutter iss in Los Angeles," 
when told I was an American. Or in field-hospi- 
tals you saw pictures of the Kaiser signed in 
mimeograph being distributed, held in motionless 
hands and stared at with a mute groping of the 
senses. In the abbey farmyard of Vis-en-Artois, 
1 8-year-old Saxon recruits were at drill, none more 
than five feet tall, showing the straits to which 
even inexhaustible Germany has been reduced. 

At table with officers in the chateaux, one might 
have been at home in one of our Army or Navy 
messes. The war to them had become routine. 
You thought to be at the throbbing core of field 
opinion on the conflict, to find talk of its strategy 
or emotions taboo. Instead, you heard the per- 
sonal banter of any such trained men at their 
tasks in peace times; gossip of their English, 
French, American friends of yore, an incurious 
noting of the time elapsed since receiving letters 
from them, eulogies to the delights of London or 
Paris. You were lucky if you could so far extract 
a comment such as: " We only hate the English 
for having caused the war, which we did not 



GERMAN SWORD 231 

want." True or not, falsely promoted by the 
Foreign Office or no, this idea is held sincerely 
throughout Germany. But personal venom, vi- 
tuperation, is always beneath professional fighters. 

At one headquarters where we saw an artillery 
duel from a roof, I sat at dinner next an abrupt, 
honest Prussian. A type, he, with his long thin 
nose and blue coat. It was a Bavarian mess — 
Bavarians are simply Irishmen brought up on 
beer — and he was being ragged as an outsider. 

" Yes, I am from Berlin," he winked at me. 
" And of the creme de la creme there." 

His tormentor was one of the four present, 
who, as the press-bureau man along awedly con- 
fided to me, had " enough quarterings to marry 
royalty." 

" He is our komiker," said the officer opposite. 

But to me the komiker grew suddenly serious. 
" We have to talk so," he confided simply, " in 
order to, how do you say in English — ? " 

" Keep up your spirits?" I hazarded. 

" Yes." His eyes dropped. In a moment he 
excused himself, to go up stairs. " I must finish 
my night's work," he said. 

The unquestioned simplicity and candour of the 
Prussian is mystifying, as to its source in real in- 
itiative of thought, or in following standard mili- 
tary verdicts. Take the question always upper- 
most to a stranger, of how long the war will last 



232 FIVE FRONTS 

and how it will end. The average officer's answer 
is ever the same: In the spring, when Russia will 
quit, sick of prisoners lost and unable to get more 
ammunition and arms, so that we can concentrate 
troops on the French front. But next day you 
meet the fellow who swears with even deeper con- 
viction that Russia will never give up. " Arms 
and guns?" laughs he. "She can manufacture 
all she wants. Who wins the war depends on 
which nation's money holds out the longest, and 
Germany has the most." 

A neutral profits nothing by arguing with par- 
tisans. You dodge quoting the Allies' figures, nat- 
urally, and that Germany has merely so far sub- 
scribed the most gold for her war. 

But candour may overreach itself, letting the 
wish father the thought, as in the case of the 
dumdum exhibit gleefully made to us in one head- 
quarters. You learn to sidestep such charges, to- 
gether with " atrocities " and the real neutrality 
of Belgium business. Only ex-parte evidence is 
sought to support cruelties, for which reliable eye- 
witnesses cannot exist, and the real facts of po- 
litical matters are always deliberately withheld. 
Bullets with aluminum caps easily ripped off were 
shown us, together with a rifle which had a device 
apparently for that. But I recognised the gun as 
a model out of date in the British service, and 
formerly made for use in the tropics only; also, 



GERMAN SWORD 233 

that the attachment was primarily a cut-off to 
transform the rifle from a magazine into a single 
shot arm, yet which could snap a bullet to be soft- 
nosed for shooting game. The absurdity, in the 
rapid fire of warfare, of employing it to make 
dumdums, since seconds would be used to trans- 
form each shell, quite condemned it for that pur- 
pose. I further knew that many English colonial 
troops had come into the field with whatever equip- 
ment they could muster. 

Had any one present seen a soldier using that 
gun? No. Was the rifle taken from men ac- 
tually fighting? Well, they were captured "by 
the thousand," and hundreds of affidavits existed, 
of photographs taken in hospitals, showing the 
effect of soft-nosed bullets. A steel one ricochet- 
ing or at very close range may tear the flesh in the 
same manner. I form no opinion, though know- 
ing that leaden bullets have always been regulation 
for the side-arms of British bicycle scouts. 

But Prussian simplicity came under no such 
doubt when we were taken inside the mediaeval 
fortress of Lille — worthless now but a miracle 
of strength and architecture in Louis XIV's day 
1 — and paraded before Indian prisoners. There 
were three turbaned sheiks, two Rajputs, and one 
Brahmin. We could not speak to them, nor they 
to us, for the English officer uses native languages 
to his men. Their silence was implacable, ter- 



234 FIVE FRONTS 

rible. Between us and the German showmen in 
their elegant grey cloaks and varnished boots, they 
in khaki, puttees, and turbans distinguished not the 
least. You could sense their conscious superiority, 
their inner oriental thought, holding us all men 
of Chandala, as we stood in the cold drizzle of the 
North staring at them behind those bars. I found 
myself estimating how loyal to their lost officers 
they must be, how they despised their keepers, 
whose glee was childish in this show maintained to 
score the baseness of pitting brown men against 
white. You felt the callousness of the Teuton, 
his inability to put himself in the place of other 
peoples, to see through any eyes except his own, 
which is the secret of his incessant lapses in di- 
plomacy. 

The same crudity was impressive on the old 
King of Bavaria's birthday, at its celebration to 
which we were led in a great square of the city. 
It was a grand review before the Crown Prince, 
a very orgy of goose-stepping, of massed troops 
singing old German war songs, as they filed past 
officers at stiff attention, wasp-waisted like danc- 
ing masters. Rank after rank of simple peasant 
faces, utterly blank with homage in democratic 
eyes, turned jerkily to face them, like the wooden 
automata of some vast mechanical toy. I turned 
to look behind, to see how many Lilleois had 
gathered to witness this paradigm of power and 



GERMAN SWORD 235 

aristocracy. Hardly one. Only a crowd of gam- 
ins lined the square, staring as at some novel cir- 
cus parade. The adults and especially all women 
remained behind the closed doors of shop or home. 

The " fall " of Lille had, as I have hinted, its 
diverting side. For the man-in-the-street, indeed, 
the occupation of a city by an invading army in this 
war is like nothing more than the advent of 
Knights of Pythias to their convention town. But 
with this difference: the military guests have to 
supply their own flags and decorations. Here the 
so-called bombardment lasted off and on between 
the 10th and 12th of October, though operations 
began about the 4th, when the English troops with- 
drew, leaving some 3,000 French, mostly Africans, 
in the city and suburbs. For a week the author- 
ities wavered as to whether Lille was an open or 
a closed town, could or could not be bombarded. 
Daily, detachments of Uhlans galloped about, 
fearlessly hitching their horses outside the French 
headquarters, as they went in to receive contra- 
dictory or equivocal answers. The French cav- 
alry always managed to miss the enemy; one force 
would turn the end of a street just as the other 
entered it. Once two foot detachments, each 
scurrying out of town by trains — still running, 
mind — met at the ticket-office in the railway sta- 
tion, for a fray and slaughter. 

" Out in my suburb," the American manager of 



236 FIVE FRONTS 

the harvester factory told me, "all I was scared 
about was being caught between two gangs chasing 
each other around. Made me sort of nervous, 
that, and to see coon officers on horseback drawing 
guns." 

Lille was finally declared closed. The bom- 
bardment began one Sunday night, and though the 
Germans passed the word that it would cease in 
the morning, firing continued all Monday. Ex- 
actly one civilian was killed. 

And to-day in Brussels, as I started by saying, 
life is no more punctilious. Near daylight this 
morning, in the King of Spain bar, I was listening 
to two youths as they drank Scotch whisky. One 
was a German under-officer, the other a Belgian 
private, who, a straggler from the defense of Ant- 
werp had since been rusticating in civilian clothes. 

"To-morrow I leave to join my regiment in 
France," I heard the Belgian confide. 

"Ach!" said the German, "but how can 
you?" 

" It is easy enough. I have an American pass- 
port, of course, such as any one can get. It will 
take me across the Dutch frontier. I go by 
steamer to Folkestone and thence to Havre." 

"Good-luck to you. Pros't! And may we 
meet as happily, some day, on the firing-line." 
Laughing, they slapped one another on the back. 

Here the one flavour of war or conquest you 



GERMAN SWORD 237 

can get is to whisper " Sabotage! " when dining 
with officers, and the Belgian waiter is slow* in 
bringing your oysters. And yesterday, at Liege, 
our good General Staff hosts themselves finally 
tumbled to the joke of our junket. Surrounded 
by what history is making the most famous forts 
in the world, we were whisked away to view — 
a thirteenth-century church portico in a village 
called Huy. 
Whewl 



PART V 
WITH THE RUSSIANS IN BUKOWINA 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 

Novo Sliatsa. Bessarabia (Russia), February 
19. — Three days spent with Cossacks on the job, 
at their midwinter fighting around Czernowitz, 
as I retreated with them through Bukowina, now 
make the climax of such adventures as entering 
the city between Russian evacuation and Austrian 
occupation, much as one plunges into the uncanny 
dead-centre of a typhoon, and crossing between 
the two enemies' lines by a burned pontoon bridge 
on the River Pruth. And I had the friendship 
during battle of no less a character than the 
" notorious " Shechin, Captain of Hussars, the 
" bandit of the first rank," as he is called in 
Austria, who for three months held all Bukowina 
with a handful of men; who loves life, hates no 
one, and regards his feats as something of a tre- 
mendous joke. 

Neutral Rumania, with Czernowitz in striking- 
distance of her northern tip, made these risks 
possible. Hats off to her for that, though her 
attitude toward joining the war, like a crow wait- 
ing to pounce down upon spoils won by others, 
makes hard any sympathy for her chocolate sol- 

241 



242 FIVE FRONTS 

diers, who want Transylvania without fighting for 
it. 

In a nutshell, the Bukowina campaign is pivotal 
because if the Russians hold it Rumania probably 
will join them; if not, she won't — this, aside 
from Rumania's ever ready me-too to any jump 
by her big brother, Italy. Hence the feverish 
Austrian effort to win back the province, the ab- 
surd official exaggeration of the numbers fighting 
and lost on both sides there. But I have tales 
more human and colourful than politics or 
strategy. 

Dl. Take Jonescu, ex-Premier of Rumania, 
a greyish plump man of Macedonian blood, far 
too wise and able for his country, gave the de- 
cisive cue one day in Bucharest to a young Ameri- 
can named Curtin, and myself. At present I am 
barred from following the Austrian army for 
having shown sympathy for Servia in these let- 
ters; my veracity has not been questioned for what 
I reported there and in Slavonia; but in the flat- 
tering phrase of the German Foreign Office: 
" Ihre Artikel sind nicht freundschaftlich genug." 

I got the forbidding wire as I was leaving the 
Balkan capital for a promised German Staff ex- 
pedition to von Hindenburg and Poland. And 
Russian army rules against reporters are as iron- 
clad as England's; while Rumania, famed always 
as the " tightest " country in Europe toward for- 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 243 

eigners, had her Bukowina frontier locked like 
the German jaw on Belgium. 

" But visit the Russian Legation," suggested Dl. 
Jonescu. " I think the Minister will get you per- 
mission from the Governor of Czernowitz to go 
there. In that case, our police would let you 
pass the frontier." 

If true, it meant a chance to see fighting, could 
we strike battle lines beyond the two border towns 
of Mihaleni or Mamornitza. The Russian Min- 
ister the same day left mysteriously for Petro- 
grad, but his Charge d' Affaires promised to wire 
the Bukowina capital, and assured Curtin and me 

— how guilessly I do not know, for the Governor 
was then probably decamping for this filthy town 

— that the request should be granted. But this 
would take four days. They yielded nothing. 

Finally, last Monday night, with no credentials 
beyond passports, we held up both Dl. Panaitescu, 
head of the Rumanian secret police, and our own 
Legation, at the point of the pencil, as it were; 
the first we tackled on the plea that Russian per- 
mission was on the way, wherefore the police chief 
wired the two said towns to let us pass, and our 
own Minister wrote a paper empowering us to 
investigate Americans in Czernowitz and vicinity. 
It was in English, which no patrol of either army 
had a chance of understanding; but red seals 
stamped with the American Eagle work wonders, 



244 FIVE FRONTS 

no matter how reasonlessly, and it bore one. 
Thus next noon found us twisting on a jerkwater 
line three hundred miles north of the devilish " lit- 
tle Paris " that Bucharest thinks it is, across the 
snowy hills of Moldavia, into the terminal town 
of Dorohoi. 

Typical of strangers' treatment in Rumania was 
our greeting there. As we drove up from the 
station, a dolled-up soldier burst out of his sentry 
box to gesticulate that we must visit the prefect 
of police at once. Before we could reach his office, 
a peasant in round black cap and sheepskins hove 
out of a cafe brandishing a whip, to air his knowl- 
edge of German to the same effect. But we won 
the local official. 

The question then was whether to choose 
Mihaleni or Mamornitza to enter Bukowina. 
We wanted to strike Russian, not Austrian troops; 
and to calculate how far across the Sereth River 
the latter were was beyond my strategy, knowing 
the customs of Austrian officers and being igno- 
rant of the number of coffee-houses in the prov- 
ince. Finally the prefect banged a fist on his desk 
and averred " officially " that they were opposite 
the former town; so we cast the die for Mamor- 
nitza, on the Pruth, some 25 kilometres east of 
Czernowitz itself, and began the voyage thither 
in a sea-going hack drawn by four ponies hitched 
abreast, like a circus chariot-race. 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 245 

Forty-four kilometres was the distance, over 
glittering fields where the maize stubble was re- 
appearing under the sun of that first February day 
when you feel the backbone of winter broken. It 
was through a land of high-thatched huts, queerly 
Japanese, except that their walls of mud smoothed 
over wattle and painted blue all had sagged askew. 
Yet it was a clean land of security and peace, in 
pitiful contrast to the war-branded homes in store 
for us across the border; a land where the folk 
drank wine from the Danube vineyards, and Spitz- 
tailed dogs and mottled pigs drowsed on the door- 
steps. 

Down a long hill into the wide Pruth valley, 
with the white, eye-aching horizons of Russia 
ahead; a long turn west up the river, and at last 
the hovels of Mamornitza, where horizontal fron- 
tier poles, as at a railway crossing, barred the 
road. First Rumania's, striped red, yellow, and 
blue ; then a rickety wooden bridge over a creek, 
and the like Austrian barber-pole effect, in black 
and orange. A rod back of each in their respec- 
tive countries, pretentious stucco custom houses 
dominated the frozen muck. Peasants with 
loaded sleds and hand-carts, or back-packing grain 
sacks, crowded both sides of the Rumanian barrier. 
But for us the burning matter was, Who guarded 
the black and orange pole? There the striped sen- 
try-box gaped empty. Not a soul visible in the 



246 FIVE FRONTS 

Austrian village, and over the sign " K. u. k. 
Zollamt " on the Imperial building, windows were 
smashed, our first hint of the world war in this 
remote corner of the East. 

" No one has been there for a week," a flat- 
nosed, swarthy soldier, rifle in hand, told us in 
German. " Three days ago two Cossacks burnt 
and looted the hotel." And he continued hum- 
ming the tune that we had interrupted, which, by 
heaven knows what cosmic linking, was " Under 
the Bamboo Tree." 

We paid our driver and made for the Rumanian 
custom house. The commissioner, true to na- 
tional habit, was away somewhere, but might re- 
turn in an hour, two hours, or next morning. So 
said his moustached and dapper clerk, as he 
penned under a lamp a lengthy paper, which he 
called a " dossier," indicting a sloe-eyed youngster 
for smuggling contraband — sugar, if I remem- 
ber. The chief had orders to let us pass the 
frontier, but we must see him first. There would 
be a poker game that night with the quarantine 
doctor, and we were welcome. We waited, two, 
three, infuriating hours. At last we floundered 
in the darkness up the road and banged on the 
door of the first lighted hut, to demand a lodg- 
ing. 

It was no inn, but a stout woman in an em- 
broidered waist cooked us eggs, produced vin alba 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 247 

to drink, and let us sleep on sofas in a back room, 
after she had shooed out the card and drinking 
party of a fat colonel in a white astrakan cap, a 
girl in black with gipsy earrings, and a pock- 
marked refugee from Czernowitz. He had kept 
a restaurant there, and foretold fearsomely a bat- 
tle all about us for next morning or the day after. 
The Russians still held Czernowitz, he said, but 
Austrian Uhlans had been seen that afternoon in 
Mologhia, ten kilometres south from the road to 
the city that we should follow. Waking in the 
night, I kept hearing remote sounds from across 
the Pruth, but foolishly failed to read their mean- 
ing then: barking dogs, the distant creak and rat- 
tle of heavy axletrees. Some rooster with a very 
dissipated crow brought a wan day of drifting 
snowflakes, and with it the resolve over our host- 
ess's coffee to defy the dapper customs clerk, flout 
the barber-poles, even swim the boundary creek, 
if his boss had not returned and the guards kept 
us from crossing. 

Then I put all the money I had into my shoes, 
and never was I afterwards so ashamed of a pre- 
caution. But all through the eastern war scene, 
until you know it well, persists the sworn rumour 
that Cossacks met in the field invariably rob you. 
And Cossacks, or Uhlans, we pledged ourselves to 
meet, hunt them up, or bust, that day. 

We routed the clerk from his bunk, who stirred 



248 FIVE FRONTS 

up the returned commissioner. That person was 
snoring, with a black fur cap on his round gipsy 
face, and grunted for us to wait half an hour, till 
we cut in with some strong German and a few 
English cuss-words. At that he waved an arm 
to the soldier dogging us, who, outside in the 
road, let us duck under his barber-pole. The 
Austrian one we vaulted — foot-free, at length, 
between the lines in a snowstorm, having no food 
nor any scrap of paper to justify our presence with 
either army. 

I got the first thrill of the many to come. In- 
stantly, in the swirling flakes that veiled the de- 
serted houses, all windowless, many burnt ruins, 
even Rumania seemed far away as home, say. 
One felt the chances ten to one of never getting 
back across the boundary here, if either army 
closed about us; and the police chief, Panaitescu, 
had dodged all responsibility of assuring a return 
to his country by any route. It was not my first 
still-hunt for the clash of arms in the war, but 
the most exciting this, without question. I 
thanked my stars that young Curtin with me was 
a Yankee, the lean, keen, resourceful sort, that 
will play the game wherever his head may rest at 
dark. 

" We'll hit something — bound to," he panted, 
as we topped the long hill, free finally of any 
dwellings. 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 249 

At first and for nearly an hour no being blurred 
the utter white and snowy fields so vaguely dis- 
cernible. Not a sound while we plunged on 
westward, straining eyes for any moving shade 
of peasant, horseman, uniform, against the ever- 
dark line of such a close horizon. Dimly behind 
rose the hills of the frontier; ahead, hazy woods. 
It was after eight o'clock when life began stirring. 
A peasant woman in a white cotton hood and a 
skirt of sacking, a basket on her arm, crossed the 
road, heading south before we could accost her, 
by a faint track in the very direction of Mologhia. 
Then came a rheumy-eyed old man, hobbling to- 
ward Mamornitza on a cane. He spoke only 
Rumanian. A farm and haystacks loomed out; 
next, clattering up behind, for the road was drifted 
bare of snow, a cart driven by two shaggy peas- 
ants and loaded with sacks — meal or contraband, 
likely — passed by our lazy frontier friends. 
Soon this seemed the road's great activity; empty 
sleds and V-sided little wagons flocked toward 
Mamornitza. We stopped and questioned each. 
The hooded occupants were unanimous. 

" The Russians have gone back from Czerno- 
witz," they said (Die Riissen sind zuriick gegan- 
gen) and excitedly, but in peasants' mere awe of 
change, neither with joy nor regret. " But Cos- 
sack patrols are still in the city." 

So. We seemed hitting things just right. We 



250 FIVE FRONTS 

hurried on, seeing farther to the south now, for 
the storm was thinning. But mile after mile we 
went, and never an Austrian uniform. It became 
the old, discouraging game of chasing a battle. 
Even the crows felt fooled and cheated, holding 
indignation meetings in every tree. Down a long 
hill, crested with old trenches now empty, we 
found the village of Ostritza, and invaded a 
thatched hut full of Rumanians. It was washing 
day inside. Three swarthy women stood over 
steaming tubs and agreed to cook us eggs, while 
the head of the house hitched up a low sledge for 
our last lap to the city. 

" We have been robbed, of course," they said, 
nerveless, unapprehensive, cheerful, in the way of 
all peasants in a war-wracked land. " Yes, by 
the soldiers of both armies." 

" But we are living still, mother," sighed a dark 
young girl with a bracelet. " It will be all right. 
No one is starving." 

And as we ate, fishing rock-salt from a huge 
sack, a grey cat dozed on atop the square mud 
stove, unconcerned as the hens outside — all over 
Europe hens are the real heroes, still impartially 
productive in the sweep of armies. And we paid 
but 60 heller (12 cents) for our half-dozen eggs; 
five crowns for the sled. 

■ Then outside in the sled, and the old man lash- 
ing his bony bay horse, we climbed out of the 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 251 

valley. Once more bleak uplands, occasionally a 
roadside cross with a tiny peaked roof, and the 
storm whipping up to a blizzard. Towards 
eleven, by the increasing huts and laden wagons 
headed with us, we knew we approached the city's 
outskirts. Children, women in huge felt boots 
and rawhide coats, but never more than white 
cotton hoods on their heads, trudged beside their 
household gods. Refugees returning, of German 
blood by their square pink faces, the father of 
each family at our inquiries would wave no more 
than a joyous arm to assure that the invaders had 
gone. We gave up hope of meeting any soldiers. 
The houses became citified, corniced, with big lin- 
tels over the double windows in the Galician 
fashion, and Russische Gasse (Russian Street) 
lettered on the corner ones. Bearded Jews in 
long coats and wide black hats loitered on the 
curbs, and we knew that we were in the city. 

But slowly this approach to Czernowitz 
changed its character. Not before in the war had 
I run into a phase that grew so in foreboding. 
Now for memorable hours we encountered not 
a single uniform, nor local official, even of police. 
After three months, an alien invader suddenly 
had left the population, dazed, gaping, leaderless. 
Whatever the truth of brutalities — always im- 
possible to verify — preceding so unique a state, 
strangers like us knew that we had to deal with 



252 FIVE FRONTS 

all the inertia of ignorance and passion in the most 
polyglot of peoples, among whom suspicion of 
espionage came first and strongest. Customarily, 
according to report, in reoccupying an Austrian 
town, the civil population points out to the en- 
tering troops suspected spies, or any persons it 
may have a grudge against, as a means of getting 
solid with the military, and they are dealt with — 
summarily. 

The street pitched down hill, over a railway 
line entering from the south. Kosher signs ap- 
peared on the walls; many windows were broken, 
some shops looted, but most were tight closed be- 
hind fluted iron shutters. Idle citizens eyed us, so 
conspicuous with our queer sledge, and we heard 
muttered comments. A pole stretched from walk 
to walk barred the way, and a boy of fourteen 
came out of the tollhouse with a strip of paper for 
our driver. He wore a red Hungarian soldier's 
cap and said he had just returned to his post. 
Up another hill, now in the swarming heart of 
the city, and we scraped over cobbles into the main 
square, across -which we spotted the Schwartzen 
Adler Hotel,, and made for it, the strangest out- 
fit, with my brown sleeping-bag our only luggage, 
that could have stopped there lately. 

In the open here it was market-day. Crowds 
of peasants, mostly Ruthenian and Rumanian 
women, kept up a low, gossiping murmur that yet 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 253 

in its sum had the quality of a roar, over their 
baskets and sacks, chiefly of cabbages and apples, 
which the throngs mingling among them were all 
too expectant and preoccupied to buy. The great 
pinkish Stadthaus had its high steps and arched 
porticos crowded with important-looking citi- 
zens that we carefully avoided. It filled the south 
side of the square. Behind the railing on its high, 
round tower and under a golden, emblematic 
globe, a lookout in a yellow slicker paced rest- 
lessly, peering through a spyglass for the expected 
Uhlans. Down over the entrance still hung the 
white, blue, red flag of Russia, which no one yet 
seemed to have the nerve to pull down. 

In the hotel we hunted up the porter, a manni- 
kin with a wispy beard and no chin. It was the 
usual down-at-heel Galician hostelry; huge rooms 
and lofty ceilings, filthy, with tracked mud deep 
on the stair carpets. " What use to keep it 
clean," shrugged the porter, " when it was full 
of riotous, brutal Russians?" Their officers' 
names still were chalked on the blackboard in the 
office. We ordered a fire in the high porcelain 
stove, hot water, and a barber to be sent up to 
shave us. It was our first breathing space, and 
waiting, we began, after hardly speaking for 
hours, to discuss and compare the plans and ap- 
prehensions crowding both our minds. 

Maybe the utter desertion of the hotel, the 



254 FIVE FRONTS 

restive hum of throngs under our windows, the 
peering citizens gathered on each doorstep, got 
at our nerves. Simultaneously one fact annoyed 
us — that though not even a Russian patrol was 
left in the city, that flag still waved from the town- 
hall. 

" If some one doesn't climb up and haul it down 
soon, I'll do it myself," burst out Curtin at the 
window. " Think of a German flag being left 
like that in a French or English town. Why, the 
citizens would be fighting to tear it away." 

Now and then beyond the market a red trolley 
car slid by through the driving snow. The porter 
came with water, filled and lit the stove, for the 
first time eyeing us with concern. 

" Not a citizen dared go outdoors after dark 
last night, for fear of being shot while the Rus- 
sians were going away," he told us. " They or- 
dered every one to stay indoors. Looted all the 
stores. Took a hundred women and children for 
hostages. Stole everything from that jeweller's 
there on the corner — " and he slipped away sud- 
denly. The fellow suspected us. He kept walk- 
ing up and down outside our door. 

I was shaving. Here at the heart of the sur- 
rounding conflict, in the calm dead-centre of the 
tornado, the stagnation was making me uncomfort- 
able. 



A DEAD CENTRE OF WAR 255 

" I'd like to see a uniform ! " I cried, " Austrian 
or Russian, no matter. Soldiers are always rea- 
sonable enough, whatever they may imagine about 
you. Give me the Austrians, rather than a mob 
like that one outside, after what it's been through, 
and without any head at all." 

" And have some Jew," grinned Curtin, " to 
make a hit with an officer, point us out as spies, so 
we get shot." 

At last the barber came with his kit, a yellow, 
lean man, and the one being of our four hours in 
Czernowitz who really seemed to believe us when 
we told him that we were reporters, with author- 
ity to relieve Americans. 

"When are the Austrians expected?" we de- 
manded, as we had from both the porter and the 
proprietor, a stout man with a drooping mous- 
tache, glimpsed down in the office. " Doesn't any 
one know? Hasn't any word come from them — 
can't they see anything from that tower? " 

I opened the window to catch the first clatter of 
Uhlans' hoofs on the cobbles, if they should come 
sweeping into the square. 

" In an hour or two, they say," said the barber, 
at work on Curtin. " Some think any minute. 
They had a patrol in the western part of the city 
early this morning." 

" That d — d flag there, yet," I broke out. 



256 FIVE FRONTS 

" Yes. No one dares to touch it. They're 
keeping the honour of hauling it down for the Aus- 
trian commander." 

"That's these people for you, isn't it?" ex- 
claimed Curtin. " Afraid to breathe without of- 
ficial sanction." 

Once in our chat, the friendly barber remarked 
that he had a niece in town who was " married to 
an American." An inspiration seized us. 

" Send her around," I said. " We might as 
well get some action out of the red seal on our 
Minister's paper." 

" We'll open a relief office," said Curtin. 
" Declare this room our headquarters, and our 
hours" — glancing at the clock — " 12 to 12:30 
this afternoon." Then in German, for the barber 
spoke no English, we recklessly told him to spread 
it through the city for all Americans in need of 
help to call on us. 



II 



RUNNING THE LINES FROM CZERNOWITZ 

It was nearly noon, and we were hungry. 
The barber refused to take any money. The 
Russians, he said, had never paid him, and he 
seemed not to have recovered from the daze of 
their rule. All the time at the window, watching 
and listening, I had been making up my mind. 

" We started out to see the Cossacks," I said, 
" so let's do it. Stick around here till the last 
minute, when we hear the Austrians coming, and 
then make a quick exit, across the river to the 
north bank, and hunt up the Russian army." 

" Hire one of those hacks," said Curtin, point- 
ing to a line of them below, " and by the hour, so 
we can light out on the jump. Let's get one now, 
and keep it while we're at luncheon, eh? " 

We piled downstairs, brushing by the lurking 
porter, and dickered with a young tow-headed 
driver, who had one grinning tooth. Of course, 
the gaping crowd gathered about, but once inside 
the hack, we pulled the cover down tight. We 
were to pay the fellow three crowns an hour, and 
ordered him to take us to the best restaurant in 
town. Off we clattered through the dirty, shut- 

257 



258 FIVE FRONTS 

tered streets, on which not another wheel was 
moving; and as we twisted among the heavy, 
stucco buildings — here and there a new store or 
coffee-house in the Egyptian-like architecture of 
Vienna — heads thrust under the carriage top and 
studied us insolently. Still, with each moment our 
excitement and elation grew. Opening an Ameri- 
can relief office between the lines. Nothing in 
get-rich-quick fiction quite equalled that ! 

The restaurant, on a steep side street, was small 
and jammed with stout German-chattering shop- 
keepers, noisily eating soup and mishandling their 
forks. We asked the driver in, had him fed at 
another table, and over our own boiled pork and 
kraut — beer, too, and all cheap enough — dis- 
creetly talked no English. The guests, as if jaded 
by successive occupations of their city, were 
calmly swapping wild tales of 20,000 Russians 
having been made prisoners, and of a Rumanian 
patrol near the border that had fired on German 
troops. 

In half an hour, we were back in our " office, " 
escorted by the gum-shoe porter, to face four 
" clients," two women and two men. And from 
now, whether through the porter's activity, the sus- 
picious crowds, or our announcement sent broad- 
cast by the barber, we had not a moment's peace. 
We made a great show of taking notes on each 
case, but every instant were interrupted by a bang 



RUNNING THE LINES 259 

on the door. First the porter to have us write 
our names and biography, according to police regu- 
lations, then the stout proprietor to make us do 
it all over again, on more exacting printed forms. 
And after our record as " American Relief Com- 
mittee " (in English), we each honestly added, 
" auch Kriegsvertreter." 

" That'll mystify any Austrian general," said 
Curtin. " They'll never reconcile a relief job 
with a reporter dog. Think us spies when they 
see it, sure." 

Came the porter again, with a message from the 
toothless driver; where we wanted to go and when 
we were going to pay him? 

Our delegation comprised a cross-eyed young 
woman, an old man with frizzled hair who pro- 
duced for identification no more than his declara- 
tion of intention for citizenship, a grinning, gar- 
rulous fellow in a sort of smock, and a full-lipped, 
dark lady with a tragic mien, the barber's niece. 
She alone had the only lien on our flag — no pass- 
port, of course, but a letter from the Vienna Em- 
bassy, into whose bailiwick we really were butting, 
and a New York Health Department birth certifi- 
cate of one of her three children. For two 
others, she had a Department paper denying that 
the city had any record of their birth. Her name 
was Fischer, she said that her husband lived on 
Essex Street, New York, and she wanted to get 



260 FIVE FRONTS 

to him. Had plenty of money in the bank, but 
the Austrians would let her draw only 200 crowns 
($40) a month. Wanted to reach Vienna, and 
see the Embassy, but we advised her to write 
there, now that communication would be open, 
and save railway fare. 

" Ah, do you think so? " she shook her head, 
bitterly. " I had better go while I can, for the 
Russians will be back here, soon enough." 

The others may have come to spy on us, but 
they seemed chiefly anxious to know if any ships 
were sailing to America, facts the German coun- 
tries deny to possible emigrants. We reassured 
them. The talkative man merely wanted to get 
back to Chicago, where he had been a plumber's 
helper. 

No sooner were they gone than the tow-headed 
driver himself bounded into the room. Taking 
Curtin aside, he whispered to him in German, with 
an air of treacherously plotting with us — 

" Only tell me the truth. It's all right. 
Where do you really want to go? I'll take you 
there." It was now nearly three o'clock. 

" This is getting fierce," I said. " If we're go- 
ing to cross the lines to the Russians, let's start our 
get-away now, anyhow." 

Instantly we agreed on the move, cast the die. 
The one difficulty lay in my blanket-bag, for we 
had hired the room for the night. To decamp 



RUNNING THE LINES 261 

with it now, paying for the room, might add the 
last straw to the hotel's suspicions. To sneak 
away dodging our bill was alluring but impossible. 
We managed to steal downstairs, avoiding the 
porter, and the moustached proprietor actually 
swallowed our story that we might be back that 
night, or might not; and charged us two crowns 
for the use of our " office," to date. 

In the square, most of the market women had 
made away with their goods. As the seedy loi- 
terers surrounded us, you could see a great stir 
around the Stadthaus, men running up and down 
the steps, the lookout on the tower gone from his 
post, but all without exclamation or sound over 
the snow. 

"Hark!" cried Curtin, bracing rigid as we 
jumped into the hack. 

It was the climax of our long tension, the final 
break in the uncanny calm at this dead-centre of 
war. 

Distinctly from up the square we heard clatter- 
ing hoofs, confused exclamations, one falsetto 
shout. 

" Here they come," I said. " Drive like the 
devil!" 

"Wo — wohin?" demanded single-tooth, 
hoarsely, ducking his head under the hood. 

" Down to the river. Across the bridge. The 
Austrians! " 



262 FIVE FRONTS 

For an instant he stared at us, stonily. My 
heart rose to my mouth. Then he lashed up his 
horses. 

I had hardly noticed all the faces thrust under 
the hack cover. But at my last words they 
nodded, began a babel of talk, and as we dashed 
away hands were thrust out toward the reins. 

But we eluded them, swaying and bumping 
around three or four corners, keeping ourselves 
hidden. Then suddenly the driver pulled up, and 
we looked out into a deserted side street. Up 
went the hood again, and that sly face once more 
confronted us : 

" The bridge is blown up. No one can cross- 
the Pruth." 

"Why the devil didn't he tell us?" said Cur- 
tin. " It looks like a plant." 

"You want to go to the Russians?" croaked 
the fellow, as if he were suggesting murder. " I'll 
take you there." 

"How? Where?" 

" There's another bridge they forgot. Ten 
kilometres away," he pointed east with his whip. 
" At Ostritza." 

" The place we passed through this morning," I 
remembered. " I think it's a blind, to drive us 
into the Austrians." 

" And we'd be certain now to meet them, on the 
way there," said Curtin. 



RUNNING THE LINES 263 

11 Let's take a look here, anyhow," I com- 
promised; and to the driver — "The railway 
bridge, that we started for. And schnell! 
schnell! " 

He obeyed. We rattled on down the hill, 
swinging left (west). It seemed miles, past the 
big deserted railway station, where the orange 
and black letter-boxes by the entrances were 
mashed and split open. At length, reaching a 
long level, the houses thinned; broken fences gave 
upon unkempt flats, with the River Pruth, half 
frozen, flowing through them. We stopped at 
such a gap and got out, to be instantly surrounded 
by a mob, but mostly of youths. 

The blizzard had changed into a drizzle. From 
here two bridges at once were visible, both great 
structures of arched black girders, with two seg- 
ments in each blown up and drooping into the 
river. Furthest, and on the right, the railway 
bridge, untouched after it had first been wrecked, 
by the retreating Austrians in November, prob- 
ably. But the road bridge close by was veiled in 
a crackling, eddying cloud of smoke. It had been 
repaired with wooden trestlings, which the Rus- 
sians had fired and were still burning. Then, be- 
tween them, we sighted what made our spirits leap 
— a low bridge of pontoons, which for a distance, 
at least, through the ice, seemed intact. 

We made for it, followed by the crowd, ques- 



264 FIVE FRONTS 

tioning them. A rowdy with a cast in his eye 
made himself spokesman. The Russians had 
soaked the structure with petrol, but the river had 
put it out. Standing where it began, you could 
see that, as it wriggled out, flat and close on the ice 
and water, to an open space both sides of which 
were charred and black. For some ten feet be- 
tween them the chill current leaped and foamed. 
Could we get across? Planks a-plenty were lying 
about. Who was on the other side of the river? 

" Kossaken, Kossaken ! " answered the crowd, 
with exclamations of " Schiessen," and panto- 
mime. And if they didn't shoot us, said the 
crooked-eye youth — " You will be sent to Si- 
beria." It was no use to laugh. 

" The Cossacks are right behind that house," 
chimed in another, pointing to a burned building 
between the far end of the pontoon and the road 
bridge. " We have thrown cartridges into the 
burning trestle, which explode and bring them out 
to peer at us through their glasses." 

We hesitated. It was something of a moment. 
With the Austrians in the city, to cross the river, 
even could we make it, would be risking the al- 
ways dangerous and forbidden act in war of pass- 
ing between enemies. The best we could be sure 
of, with our lack of proper papers, and the chances 
all against any Cossacks being able to read, was to 
be hailed and arrested by the first sentry. But we 



RUNNING THE LINES 265 

debated nothing. Dragging the gang back to the 
carriage, our idea seemed mutual to reconnoitre a 
bit. We made the toothless one drive us up the 
hill above the road bridge. And from there, 
looking down on the straggling, one-story, tin- 
roofed shacks of the far bank, not a human being 
was visible. 

As a fact, my mind had long been made up. 
And if Curtin's wasn't, it took only a word to win 
him. Our sworn job was chasing the Russians, 
and what with all our relief self-advertisement at 
the Schwarzen Adler, and the whole market-place 
thinking us spies, we were in too deep and too bad 
to face any Austrians fighting back to their city 
after its months in " barbarian " bondage. Never 
had any place so got on my nerves as Czernowitz, 
nor made me so feel the dread and apprehension 
of angry, irresponsible crowds. 

" By Heaven, I'm going to cross her," I said. 
" This town's becoming the limit." 

" Go you," said Curtin, wiping his eye-glasses. 
" I'm game." 

We were hardly an instant too soon. Back at 
the pontoon, some idea of our purpose must have 
seeped up-town, for down the road was coming a 
man in a queer whitish coat with a meal-sack on 
his back, who joined us, pointing to the planks. 
Then all at once a shout up the street, and I 
sighted four horsemen cross it, and disappear. I 



266 FIVE FRONTS 

was paying one-tooth, and he was holding out for 
an additional hour's charge — a bold scheme to 
delay us,. to be sure. He doggedly kept repeating 
over, " Drei und halb Stunden," which at least 
fixed the time in my mind. I thrust nine crowns 
at him, to take or leave, and left him growling 
and shaking his fist. Mine was trembling. I 
ran to join Curtin, bending over the planks in the 
smoke and sparks of the burning trestles. 

It took but a minute to lay the boards. We 
balanced over the ugly, icy riffle — across. But it 
was still fifty yards to where the ice met the shore. 
We let the man with the white sack, plainly a na- 
tive going home, lead. One of the kids, too, from 
the crowd had joined us, the while it thronged the 
bank, vague through the smoke, awed and silently 
gaping. 

That fifty yards. It was one of those rare, 
crowded eras of living which strips existence of 
your last vanity. 

" Thank the sense you had," muttered Curtin, 
" to stow that cash in your heel." 

I recollect that I was puzzling why we were not 
also literally burning our bridges behind us. 
Only, the wrong bridge was burning, and we had 
not set it. 

We stepped off upon frozen, crackling grass. 
Gaps in the lone wall of the burned house ahead, 
up the rise, were darkened by some invisible, mov- 



RUNNING THE LINES 267 

ing figure. To reach the road, you had to climb 
a steep bank on the left. It was a hard, icy 
scramble, and half way up I slipped and fell. Re- 
covering myself, I seized the fence rails and 
crawled between them, at last to stand upright 
before the deserted, down-at-heel village. A man 
filled what had been a doorway of the house, a 
dark face under a shaggy shako, a carbine on his 
shoulder, straps crossed diagonally on his chest, 
with big leather knee-boots under the skirt of his 
brown coat 

A Cossack sentry, on duty. 

Immediately, he turned on his heel, showed his 
back, with a careless swing. He had seen us — 
but with his eyes alone — this first Russian soldier 
I had yet beheld in the field since the war. 

Curtin and I looked at each other, breathing 
out hard. At any rate, we had passed him, were 
inside the Russian lines. 

We had turned the trick. 



Ill 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 

We kept on, as if walking on eggs, but chuckling 
to ourselves, not yet daring to talk. Chiefly I felt 
an immense sense of relief, of triumph. Any 
flushed, accusing Uhlan seemed far away now, as 
though armed trenches lay between us. As a fact, 
though we did not know it till later, the Austrians 
crossed the river hardly an hour behind us. 

You felt that at least uniforms, disciplined au- 
thority, were at hand to appeal to in trouble. 
They still overawed the (to them) alien populace, 
we were no longer at its mercy in the matter of 
suspicion and charges of spying. In that, truly, 
we had a clean slate, and being with a retreating 
army would not compromise ourselves unless 
caught trying to return to Czernowitz (the last 
thing in our minds), but get the fair benefit of any 
doubt. 

11 Haven't felt so safe for hours," I said at 
last. " I'd trust any of these Cossacks, private or 
officer, quicker than an Austrian now. But no 
more lightning relief stunts for us." 

Over the sack on the whitish man's back ap- 
peared a bunch of fine, long-tailed horses, bays and 

268 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 269 

dappled greys, waiting riderless in the middle of 
the street outside a tiny cafe. From the uniform 
raincoats on the saddles we judged them officers' 
mounts. Then walking towards us in close for- 
mation came a band of a dozen mounted men, 
Cossacks on patrol, our first sight of them at their 
famous job. 

And extraordinary, impressive they were. 
Their huge conical hats were of all shades of 
shaggy wool, from snowy white, through grey as- 
trakan, to black. The features beneath were full- 
lipped and swarthy, but at the same time white 
men's faces; terrible yet kindly, with a sort of tol- 
erant lordliness and pride of life. They, too, 
passed hardly glancing aside at us. Likewise 
soon, galloping out of and down cross ways, others 
came riding, huge and lithe, with that same saddle- 
tight, not-rising ease that our West knows. 

Not one but utterly ignored us. We were free 
from the uncanny dead-centre of conflict, but its 
stress was still far away. 

A lame man emerged from a wicker gate, and 
tipped his hat to more. At first we too did so, 
but soon decided this was subservient, and there- 
after always saluted instead. We entered an icy 
waste edged with warehouses, and the man with 
the sack kept stopping to talk with passersby. 
They would halt, mutter, and stare after us with 
a prying curiosity. Group after group thus; we 



270 FIVE FRONTS 

were becoming as marked as in Czernowltz — the 
folk informed by our companion, who may have 
known too much about us and invented more. 

We were ahead now with the trudging young- 
ster. In the middle of that open a dead man 
was lying flat on the ice. His cane, with a curved 
handle, lay behind him. He was a stout old fel- 
low, in a ragged brown ulster and black sugarloaf 
hat, with the red still lingering in his cheeks, as 
if frozen there. There was blood on the snow 
and blood on his grey beard, but we could find no 
bullet-hole. 

" Hemorrhage," I concluded. " Some sort of 
apoplexy." 

" Couldn't have died of fright," said Curtin, 
" because he isn't a Jew." 

Who would ever care, or could tell? Had he a 
wife, sons, a daughter? Where were they, and did 
they know? Any one that passed made a blind 
circuit around him. He was least of all our affair. 

We crossed the railway track leading down the 
north bank of the Pruth (east) to the village of 
Boian, which we had guessed was the main point 
of the retreat, and toward this place in Russia. 
But first we kept on into the town of Sadagura, 
six kilometres from the river. In its small square 
gaped the same idle, restive crews as in the city, 
always so void of womankind. 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 271 

" Let's hunt up a Cossack officer," I said, " and 
square ourselves. We'll feel more comfortable, 
and it'll be getting dark soon, with this country 
alive with excited patrols." 

The kid returned my bundle, and paying him 
gathered a crowd. We chartered another one to 
show us the Cossacks' barracks, " In unser Kaiser's 
Kaserne," as he indignantly said, leading down 
a street to a great stone-walled enclosure full 
of low, military buildings that still bore the 
duplex eagles and orange and black of Austria; 
but with a Cossack at every gate. I aired my 
bad Russian to the first one, who directed us to 
a shop with broken windows opposite the next 
entrance, where we found an under-officer. We 
tried to show him our passports, to make him let 
us into a back room where his superiors could be 
heard talking; but he flatly refused, nor did our 
papers seem to interest him. Yet, obvious 
strangers that we were, he betrayed not the least 
suspicion. He wore a blue uniform, had a round, 
ruddy face, black moustache, and very arched eye- 
brows. 

" But we want permission to go about with 
you," I said. 

" How can you? " he answered, with a twinkle. 
" Because I am not going anywhere, but shall stay 
right here." 



272 FIVE FRONTS 

" Then we want to follow your army wherever 
it has marched." 

" Travel where you please," he said, nonchal- 
antly, waving a hand. " Cross over into Russia, 
if you wish. I don't care." 

Amazed, we left him. From the spy-mad 
French and English, from the alert and rigorous 
Germans or Austrians of the front, such casual 
treatment would have been impossible. Back we 
went to the square to hire a vehicle to take us to 
Boian. A tall Jew, in brown gaiters, who dom- 
inated the throngs, told us none could be had, un- 
less a peasant's cart from out in the country. He 
was the one citizen we had met who seemed rea- 
sonable, in his right mind, and he spotted us at 
once for Americans. A little boy doubtfully 
spoke up that he knew of a Jew who owned a car- 
riage and two horses, and we credulously let him 
lead us through a long maze of filthy alleys to a 
hovel on the highroad coming in from the 
west. 

But before we could rap on the door, it was 
slammed in our faces. We heard a great clatter 
of wheels and hoofs, and, looking up the road, 
beheld a long train of approaching artillery inter- 
spersed with Cossacks. 

" They are afraid to come out," said our boy, 
motioning to the house, " while any troops are 
passing. Or to let you in." 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 273 

"Why?" we demanded, sore enough, and 
banging on the door to no effect. 

" I told you they were Jews," he said, cowedly, 
hanging his head. " They might be killed." 

"Rot!" 

We laughed at being fooled so. What chance 
had we to get a driver to take us into the heart 
of the Russian army, who would not even budge 
from his house as troops neared it? 

" You must be a Jew, too," I said, " to have 
taken us here — for a tip." Which I gave 
him. 

" It is so," the poor child murmured. 

Through the tiny window, as twelve great guns 
laboured past in retreat — ammunition wagons 
loaded also with hay, the grey-coated, set-eyed 
drivers dozing on their seats — you could see 
shifting and furtive faces, the noses, peikas, of 
cringing men; glistening-eyed girls and women. 
Ranks of furry horsemen burst into a melancholy, 
humming chant. There was one Red Cross 
wagon. It was almost night already. 

" Come on," I said, " our game's to follow 
them on foot. They'll lead us straight to head- 
quarters." 

We started after; but the column had outdis- 
tanced us by the time we reached the square again, 
though we thought that we could follow it from 
the wheel-tracks in the mud. By now every 



274 FIVE FRONTS 

youngster in Sadagura seemed to know that we 
were Americans, with heller to spend. They 
swarmed after us, and when one begged, affirming 
that he had a father in New York, the next would 
match that by claiming a brother there, another 
bidding two sisters, and so on. The gaitered Jew 
dispersed them; we passed the hooded riders ed- 
dying in and out of the kasern grounds, and then 
in the dusk of the open road, quite alone at last, 
suddenly met three beings who made us stop in our 
tracks and murmur: 

" Their troops from Turkestan. The Turko- 
men! " 

True enough, though they were afoot, these 
beings that we had most wanted to encounter. 
Shorter, withal shaggier than the Cossacks though 
seeming dressed like them, their swarthier, pure 
Tartar faces most resembled the Buriats one sees 
in Manchuria. They had a wide golden stripe on 
each shoulder, and in their slant-eyes, moustaches 
like idols of Buddha, were oriental as Chinamen. 
They vanished toward Sadagura, only glancing at 
us like any men strayed from their command — 
men of a race warring here in the Occident for the 
first time since the days of Genghis Khan. 

For an hour the road mounted along the hills; 
every peasant's house was lightless, and the artil- 
lery wheel-tracks hard to follow. Any moment 
in the darkness, we might be hailed, halted, and 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 275 

not answering in proper Russian, get a shot. 
Finally at a burned and deserted shack, where a 
cowskin knapsack lay in the snow, the road forked. 
A peasant in white skins coming down the hillside 
fields directed us in Russian to the right for Boian. 
As we turned, a two-horse carriage came up from 
its direction; but the driver, when we tried to hire 
him, only lashed up his horses and disappeared. 
The road now veered straight across the open 
river flats, gleaming pallidly in their white cover. 
We were getting footsore; from time to time out 
there, appeared some galloping Cossack, always 
scorning the highway for the bare swamp or corn- 
fields, flitting like a ghostly shadow. 

At last the rattle of wheels, a loud, demanding 
voice broke out far behind. " Some one raising 
h — 1 with that carriage," I said. The voice kept 
up a long time, and, ceasing, it was longer before 
the sound of wheels behind approached. Sud- 
denly close, I recognised hoarse Russian words. 
No matter, we might get a lift. It was an instant 
when one should think before acting, but only 
realises that afterwards. Dimly in the gloaming 
I saw a one-horse peasant's cart with in-sloping 
sides of willow withes, and leaped into the mid- 
dle of the road, raising an arm, hallooing. That 
very boldness, probably, won us safety. The 
cart halted, the voices stopped abruptly, and, after 
a short, dead silence, came the unmistakable click- 



276 FIVE FRONTS 

ing sound of bayonets being clapped upon rifle 
muzzles. 

" Kto-to idyot?" (Who goes there?) 

" Amerikanski ! " I called, trying to laugh and 
say in Russian that we wanted to ride. " Ameri- 
kanski ! " chimed in Curtin, as we saw three round, 
brown caps of Russian infantry emerge from the 
sacks heaped in the wagon, and behind the steel 
points in our faces. We ducked under them to 
seize the edge of the cart, which evidently was the 
last outlandish act for spies or an enemy; so that, 
as we followed it up by leaping on the sacks, the 
amazed men laid down their guns, made room for 
us, and the hooded driver, whom I had taken for 
a native, lashed up his horse. 

We had had the blind nerve to hold up a patrol 
party, scouring the country for stragglers, spies, or 
Austrian scouts. A husky, square-faced sergeant, 
with a rough, bullying manner that we quickly saw 
meant nothing, was in charge of it. He de- 
manded our papers, and when we produced our 
passports signified that it was too dark to read, 
though, from the way he handled them, reading 
was beyond him. He demanded cigarettes, which 
we gave them all, and they took with a growing 
respect; and before long he ordered a ruble from 
each of us before he would put us down in Boian. 

" Are you armed? " he exclaimed suddenly, feel- 
ing my clothes. 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 277 

" No," I said, and managed to enquire whether 
he imagined that we intended to attack him. He 
gestured into the misty gloaming as to say that we 
might have to defend ourselves. 

For near two hours of the vividest war-play I 
have experienced we rode with that patrol. Al- 
ways Cossacks, galloping like mad through the 
darkness, could be seen in the pointed hoods drawn 
over their heads against the night cold, haunting 
the river-flats like headless horsemen. It was the 
war business of romance, of story-books, as remote 
from the petrol, rocket-light horrors of the West 
as our old Indian fighting. Whatever rider ap- 
proached near enough to hail, our friends would 
rise on their knees, fit on bayonets, click shells into 
their rifle magazines, and the rough sergeant shout 
his " Kto-to idyot? " Then he received some thin 
articulation out of the faint snow-phosphorescence 
of the valley, and all would sink back relieved, dis- 
assembling their weapons, to continue their minor 
song that carried you to the plains of the Ukraine, 
which the apparition had interrupted. 

And I, to be with them, cudgeled my brains for 
a Tsigane tune — 

" Vesna pridyot, 
Maneet, rubeet ! " 

that I remembered hearing in Siberia; and they 
joined in, chuckling at my mistakes. 



278 FIVE FRONTS 

Once they jumped up to stare so, challenging 
a man afoot. The sergeant sprang to the ground 
and brought back a foot-soldier, holding him by a 
wrist as though arrested, and prodding him into 
the cart with us. He had neither rifle nor knap- 
sack, but a pack of some sort bulging under the 
front of his coat. He was a fattish, beardless 
young fellow with a hang-dog look. Our friend 
in an angry mutter tore his bundle from him. It 
was oblong and heavy, a machine-gun cartridge 
box, I thought. Was he stealing it — a deserter 

— or merely back-trailing to find his rifle? It was 
beyond my Russian to inquire, and rather useless, 
for suddenly the poor youngster began to sob. 
Thereafter his captors ignored him, and he re- 
fused the cigarettes we offered. 

At last dwellings appeared, and occasionally the 
crowded carts of refugees, flying even by night. 
We stopped to question and investigate each, our 
hosts leaping out with fixed bayonets, and their 
gruff voices mingled with plaintive tales from the 
vague forms looming upon their household gods 

— heads of women, chiefly, by the white cotton 
hoods. Even two little boys dragging sleds had 
their loads prodded. 

Suddenly ahead a shouting and lashing of whips 
drew us into a great block of supply wagons, 
driven by peasants, which our sergeant skilfully 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 279 

blustered his way through to the ceaseless 
" Brur-r-r, brur-r-r! " of the carters at their tan- 
gled horses and shafts. The road plunged down 
hill, flecked by lights on both sides — Boian. 

Again the men started talking of rubles, and for 
the first and only time I was proud of the bank in 
my boots. I gave the sergeant the one ruble I 
had exchanged with the proprietor of the Schwart- 
zen Adler in Czernowitz (he had had a bursting 
wallet of them, which he called useless), and Cur- 
tin appeased him with three Austrian crowns. He 
stopped at a bridge and ordered us out, dismissing 
at the same time, out of pity I hoped, our tearful 
companion, who instantly plunged away into the 
darkness, leaving us alone, interlopers in the heart 
of the Russian force that for three months had 
held Bukowina. 

" That fire," I whispered, " we saw behind the 
house a ways back. If we can make that, all 
right — " Ignorant of passwords, we knew our 
danger well enough, which always increases the 
closer you get to headquarters. 

We hit for the fire. In the rear yard by a sta- 
ble, three muffled troopers squatted over it, cook- 
ing. They did not see us till we were well within 
the light, with our arms raised, shouting " Ameri- 
kanski ! " — a good enough countersign by the way 
it seemed to puzzle them. They merely lifted 



280 FIVE FRONTS 

their heads and blinked, until out of the stable 
loomed an alert young soldier, who, almost as if 
expecting us, and understanding my request to be 
taken to the General Staff, led us up the road and 
into a long, low house by the rear and kitchen. 
Here, while he disappeared into a front room, we 
waited interminably. The place was jammed, 
with staring officers' servants, gaping peasant 
women holding dish towels, and a couple of soup 
cauldrons on the square mud stove ; one filled with 
steaming chicken, mind, set a desperate edge to our 
hunger. Returning, he slipped quickly outside 
with a reassuring nod, actually refusing the coin 
we held out. And then the inner door opened, 
and we faced an officer with the stars of a major. 

" You speak French? " he said in that language, 
scrutinising us; and we responded likewise, as joy- 
fully as if he had hailed us in New Yorkese. 

Yet thawing him was one of the longest, hard- 
est jobs I ever tackled. He was a tall, sallow 
person, with a cold eye, and the neat black beard 
of a language professor. We placated him with 
our passports, with the story of our stay in Czer- 
nowitz and how we had crossed the lines, giving 
all a sympathetic pro-Russian slant. Never was 
my affability and my French so strained; we hinted 
of our wide wandering, the multifarious points at 
which we had touched the war, all with the back- 
thought, " Well, he must see we're Americans and 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 281 

not spies by now " ; I even referred to the Kam- 
chatkan vises got in my last year's trip there, and 
lauded the hunting in Siberia. 

"But you are journalists — ?" he hesitated, 
quite unimpressed. 

" Yes," we answered. " But that does not keep 
us from needing a place to sleep and something to 
eat." 

" Well," said he. " There is the village here." 

" But if we flounder about in the dark to get a 
lodging," I said, " we may get shot." 

" Oh, certainly. It is very likely," he agreed. 
" But one moment — " and he vanished inside. 

Curtin had just time to exult, " I think we've 
got him," when the door opened again, this time 
to admit a younger staff officer, with black hair 
plastered on a big forehead, merry brown eyes, 
and a small mouth. 

We went over the same rigmarole with him to 
prove our decency and distinction. What finally 
won him, I think, was a chance remark I made 
that in Bucharest I had seen some loathsome pho- 
tographs of Austrians' atrocities committed upon 
Servian babes and women. 

He murmured something, and also disappeared. 
In a moment the door admitted us into the front 
room, crowded with cots and kits, where an or- 
derly was setting us a table. Next, we were sit- 
ting down to macaroni soup and chat (tea) in 



282 FIVE FRONTS 

tumblers, with sugar and even lemon! A huge 
corporal was snoring on a horsehair sofa, and 
through another door we could hear the whole 
staff at their mess. 

Afterwards the Lieutenant of the plastered hair 
returned to sit with us, to entertain rather than to 
pry, as would have happened in any other army. 
In civilian life he was a lumber trader at Arch- 
angel, Belaxev, by name, who loved the woods 
and fishing, and threw English pipe tobacco — 
that we would have traded our souls for — on the 
table for us to smoke. 

We asked him about the hundred hostages 
whom, we had been told in Czernowitz, his army 
had taken away from the city; and his reply was 
typical; it bared the whole confusing spirit of 
partisan falsities you hear everywhere in the 
world-war. 

" Why, they were refugees who insisted on com- 
ing with us, because they were afraid of the Aus- 
trians," he laughed. " You should have seen 
them — little girls riding out a-straddle on our 
guns." 

" They say," we told him, " that the Austrians 
have taken 20,000 of your men prisoners, and any 
number of guns." 

That appeared to be the crowning jest. 

" We never have had more than 10,000 men in 
all Bukowina," grinned Belaxev. " Two regi- 



IN THE HANDS OF COSSACKS 283 

ments of infantry, one of Cossacks, one artillery 
battery. And our only good infantry regiment we 
sent to Servia long ago. It helped to smash that 
fellow, Poiterek. We've held the whole country 
with about 5,000 reserves, 15 guns, and 600 picked 
horsemen." 

And then we gossiped till we yawned, of hunt- 
ing in the northern woods, that we all three loved. 
Like most soldiers met in the war, and ourselves, 
he could speak only of the small segment of it 
within his experience. His confidence flashed into 
an ironic scorn only when we told him how the 
Germans expected the Russian armies to quit in 
the spring. Tea by the gallon we had drunk at 
midnight, and made a deep hole in his box of a 
thousand long Russian cigarettes. 

" By the way," he said finally, " how did you 
get across the Pruth from Czernowitz?" 

" On your pontoon bridge," we declared. 

" What! " he exclaimed. " It wasn't burned? 
Troops could cross on it? Whee-ew! " 

We nodded. " The river had put it out." 

With a long, low whistle, he sprang to his feet, 
and plunged into the messroom. Curtin and I ex- 
changed stares. 

" Spies, practically," he chuckled. " That's 
what we are. God help us from the Austrians 
now." 

" Not a bit," I winked. " We're only solid 



284 FIVE FRONTS 

where we wanted to be. It's not our fault if that 
Cossack by the bridge wasn't up to his job." 

We turned in, I on the floor in my sleeping-bag, 
Curtin on a sofa under a lithograph of the Pope 
receiving cardinals, for this was a Roman priest's 
house. The banknotes in my boots revealed a 
tragedy only less than my shame in having put 
them there. The long tramp and some vile black 
dye in their German soles had turned that money 
— English, Austrian, Rumanian — into soggy 
cardboard, which may strand us yet. As we 
dozed by the light of a long candle, first the 
bearded major came in looking for a dispatch bag, 
then various subalterns in blouses to turn in on the 
cots, muttering " Amerikanski " as they pointed 
at us. And all night old Snoreovitch in the cor- 
ner kept up his hullabaloo. 



IV 

HOLDING UP A "BANDIT" 

In the small hours Curtin started up with a 
" Hark! " The sound of heavy creaking wheels 
was unmistakable, artillery toiling westward again, 
toward Czernowitz. We kept our mouths shut 
till breakfast — tea and chicken croquettes — 
while the youngsters were turning out and playing 
with the little brown dog they called Bukowinski. 
Outside through the crowded kitchen a big brass 
samovar was steaming on the stoop; and at last 
Belaxev joined us. 

" We are going back to-day," he informed, 
guardedly. " The enemy crossed the Pruth by 
the pontoons yesterday just after you did." 

"A fight?" We thrilled with eagerness. At 
last — after chasing battle through blizzard and 
rain, like hoboes. Our Aladdin relief office be- 
tween the lines seemed stale already. 

Belaxev nodded, puckering his small mouth. 

" We've got to see it," I declared. " Can't we 
go back along the upper road, toward Ma- 
hala?" 

" The lower road will be closed by the firing 
across it," he answered. " And don't you know 

285 



286 FIVE FRONTS 

that journalists are not allowed with Russian 
armies? " 

" Is that true? We haven't heard — " we said 
with a fine air of incredulity. 

The Lieutenant turned away, and right there 
the matter dropped for good. It was as typical of 
Russian tolerance as of military men in general 
before this war. We had been told our status; 
we were trusted, and thereafter, except for the 
terrible Shechin, ignored. They could not ask us 
into their mess, but they had the decent sympathy 
not to arrest or remove us. We took the right 
cue to efface our presence as far as possible; for 
they could give no order to patrols not to challenge 
us, with the result, as you will see, that we be- 
came somewhat of a joke. 

Rime sparkled on the priest's tiny window. 
From his yard there spread out full in the dazzling 
glare of a winter-white world the invaders of 
Bukowina. For the fourth time before me — 
with the British at St. Quentin, the Austrians near 
Przemysl, the Bavarians by Ypres — here were 
fighters on tip-toe. And the contrast, the height- 
ened colour! Across the road, on a pounded 
white space edged by peasant hovels, all was in- 
fantry, arms stacked in circles, steaming soup 
kitchens, bearded fellows in long brown coats and 
English-like caps still asleep on the snow. The 
road, a jam of shaggy horsemen born to the sad- 



HOLDING UP A "BANDIT" 287 

die, of hay-stuffed Red Cross wagons, grain- 
bags on the groaning gun-carriages, all in the great 
set of life eastward, back to battle. Foremost al- 
ways the Cossacks, whether skimming head-down 
with their lances over the brilliant wastes by the 
Pruth, or close at hand in their shakos, white, 
black, the hues of all furs — each embroidered on 
top with cross-strips of scarlet, blue, green — and 
in their midst a mounted field-priest, with his long 
yellow robes, and hood thrown back, dangling a 
golden tassel. 

They passed. Long-booted officers, brown and 
dun-clad for the most part, but with puzzling 
shoulder-marks, filled the road, chatting, waving 
maps, joking. One, with the crown of his sugar- 
loaf, sable-skin cap filled with cigarettes, was a 
mark for stealthy thefts of them by his comrades. 
A little yellow cart drawn by two ponies drove up 
and deposited a load of them, which, headed by a 
small grey man in striking regimentals, went into 
conference in our priest's house. A private, with 
creepers on his feet, climbed a telegraph pole and 
cut the wires, except one leading there. 

The infantry took the march, filing four deep 
from the plain of their camp, company after com- 
pany, breaking here into some sad chant, there 
with a man playing a mouth-organ, and leading a 
lively chorus that set the group of officers laugh- 
ing. But these troops alone did not seem up to 



288 FIVE FRONTS 

scratch; their bearded moujik faces were vacant 
and stupid, few looking under forty years of age, 
as they shuffled on like sheep, pitifully out of step, 
bowed under heavy knapsacks, with long felt boots 
lashed to them, and the little spades for intrench- 
ing dangling at the skirts of their chocolate coats. 
Yet all was livened by a boy of twelve or so — the 
spirited little mascots that Russia allows in her 
ranks — running alongside with shouldered rifle 
and a stern, precocious manner of responsibil- 
ity. 

Then, with the road free, came the obverse of 
the military picture: the peasants flying from their 
homes, the real sufferers-to-be, headed in the op- 
posite direction. The women, like Eskimos, in 
their long sheep-coats, high boots, and best skirts 
— for of the last all wore the same, of violet 
cloth, with a deep red stripe. Some carried ba- 
bies, some bundles on sticks. The kids pushed the 
carts, loaded with sheet-wrapped humps of pen- 
ates, the gaunt-faced husbands trudging, awfully 
stricken in spirit, holding the reins alongside. And 
some mothers, a little girl or two — believe it or 
not, as you will — trod blue, bare feet into that 
February snow. 

Appeared another yellow cart, from which 
leaped a man in scarlet riding-breeches, who made 
straight for us. His lithe and jaunty air of au- 
thority, queer uniform, and a big mink-skin cap 



HOLDING UP A " BANDIT " 289 

over extraordinary features, at once marked His 
importance. 

" Done for," muttered Curtin. " We're ousted 
now. He's the boss." 

He had no beard, but his cropped, reddish 
moustache, instead of ending on his lips, continued 
in an up-curve to the lobes of his ears. His slant 
brown eyes challenged, yet at the same time twin- 
kled. At the moment we did not know it, but this 
was Shechin himself, Captain of Hussars, " notori- 
ous bandit of the first rank," whom we had read 
of in Austria, whose picked horsemen had " ter- 
rorised all Bukowina." 

" When you crossed that bridge yesterday," he 
plunged in, in French, " what was its condition? " 

We gasped. We told him, stammering. Ex- 
pecting to get our walking-papers, the bristling 
chief, bluffly, without mincing matters, taking us 
on faith from the rumours about us that of course 
had spread through the army, actually was putting 
himself under our obligation. 

" But horses — artillery — couldn't traverse it, 
eh?" he asked. "Show me," and he drew out 
pencil and paper. 

Rapidly he sketched the pontoons' condition 
from our description, with alert exclamations of, 
" Ah — ah ! I thought so. It is bad — unfor- 
tunate. But you are sure the road bridge was im- 
passable? " 



290 FIVE FRONTS 

"Yes," we chimed; and he was off into the 
headquarters, thanking us with elaborate polite- 
ness over his shoulder. 

" Got the ' pep,' all right," exclaimed Curtin. 
" Another friend, and we thought — " 

" D — n it ! " I kicked. " We ought to have 
held him up for a pass." 

But we dared not interrupt the strategy meet- 
ing in the house. For an hour or more we sat on 
the priest's fence, watching, waiting for the situa- 
tion to develop. Once we climbed the hill on the 
upper road, to be promptly challenged and ar- 
rested behind a corn-stack by three privates, who 
led us back to the house, where one of the sub- 
alterns in a blouse, who was on the back stoop, 
grinned and dismissed them, crestfallen. Hats off 
to the alertness of those Russian patrols. No of- 
ficer ever even looked askance at us while we were 
there, or needed to with such men on the job, wfio 
corralled you wherever you ventured. More in- 
fantry filed up the road, and no mile of the white 
blazing flats by the river was ever vacant of mov- 
ing horsemen. A horse, stalled in the second 
story of the post office next door, poked his head 
out of a window. We resolved to wait — we had 
to — until the staff should leave their house, and 
then try to sneak after them. 

In the meantime I went foraging about the in- 
fantry camp across the road, and to stake out a 



HOLDING UP A "BANDIT" 291 

lodging. In one house I bought a loaf of black 
bread — wholly baked bran, but we could have 
eaten straw soon — and in the home of an old 
German, named Max, whose walls were decorated 
with water-colours of his own painting, engaged a 
couple of benches to sleep the night on. Then, 
about one o'clock, while we were climbing the rise 
just back of headquarters, distinctly from the dis- 
tant river I heard sharp, vagrant detonations, as 
of hammer-blows upon wood. 

"Rifle-firing! It's beginning." 

Curtin at first was incredulous, but soon the of- 
ficers from the house crowded out into the yard 
below, and, field-glasses at their eyes, began search- 
ing the hills that rose sharply across the Pruth. 
Thus for a long time. The distant pock-pock of 
bullets ceased, began again increasingly. In a 
while the whole staff mounted horses tethered under 
a shed, and galloped away up the road. We could 
stand it no longer, and followed on the run. 

This time we got some hundred yards further, 
before two sentries swooped across the snow and 
gathered us in. Heart-breaking, since over the 
next hill the boom and wool-white puffs of shrap- 
nel already were breaking. 

But it was then, on the return under arrest, that 
I did what so dumbfounded Curtin, and I should 
not have dared had I had time to think. For as 
we sulked down the hill before two bayonets, the 



292 FIVE FRONTS 

sight of red knees astride a big bay, the mink 
shako and continuous red moustache of our Hus- 
sar, hit me with the obsession : " It's our one 
chance to see anything, to get anywhere." I 
never considered what it might mean to fling my- 
self in front of Russian cavalry riding to action, 
to jump out into the middle of the road and hold 
up a " notorious bandit " on his warpath, with the 
demand that he write me a pass to watch him fight. 
Yet exactly that I found myself doing. 

The trotting, shaggy company behind reined in, 
bunching tight together. And Shechin sprang 
from his bay with the greeting — 

" Ah! mon ami. Mais, certainement! " 

Curtin and I could have fallen flat at the sight 
of a feather. The two sentries opened their 
mouths, and ducked. We had whipped out our 
passports and the " bandit " was scribbling on 
them with his fountain pen: " Permit to appear 
on the road. Captain Shechin." 

" A good place here. We will take our posi- 
tion," he then said, looking around, and repeating 
the comment in Russian, as an order, to his body- 
guard. 

" Stay here with me," he turned to us, with a 
sudden, fiery enthusiasm. " You may see some 
fighting. The Austrians will be trying to cross the 
river." 



WINTER FIGHT AND PHILOSOPHY 

For the rest, our part in the Russian retreat from 
Bukowina centred in that afternoon with this as- 
tounding leader. 

There was a half-finished house of mud and 
wattle at the roadside, and by it Captain Shechin 
and his crew of some score husky fellows hitched 
their horses and took up a position. He himself, 
much as you might draw a beer bottle from under 
your coat, produced a machine gun — captured 
from the Austrians, which he was as proud of and 
eager as a boy with a new pistol to use — from the 
back of a horse's saddle, and set it up here with 
his own hands. 

Always livelier, coming now in streaming vol- 
leys, grew the woodeny tuck-tuck-tuck of firing 
down on the river-flats. But up to now no troops 
had been visible; not, indeed, till Shechin pointed 
them out to us, a long line of dots against the 
glaring snow, rising black from seas of reddish 
willows, did we see his regiment of 600 men 
strung out below. 

" Look there at my boys," he said proudly. 
"It is admirable, magnificent. They stand! 

293 



294 FIVE FRONTS 

And I have three youngsters, lieutenants, who are 
even further forward than we see, facing the Aus- 
trian fire from those houses and the woods across 
the Pruth." 

Stirring was a mild word for this fellow's honest 
pride in his men's valour. And the snow-bronzed, 
shaggy bodyguard about him, in their outlandish 
and many-coloured rigs, echoed it with catlike 
grins, as they rolled cigarettes, or from their 
pockets produced chunks of raw bacon and began 
to munch on them. A leader's homage to his 
ranks, and their silent, bashful reciprocation — 
never before had so vivid a sense of the grim yet 
humanising solidarity of fighters gripped me. 

"They are mounted down there?" I asked, 
most irreverently it soon seemed. " Not shoot- 
ing from behind their horses? " 

One look from him withered. " This is not," 
he said, " — a circus! " 

Curtin and I backed off into the hut. For the 
four hours that we watched this skirmish, so typi- 
cal of the Bukowina campaign, we tried to efface 
ourselves, not to annoy him. But Shechin would 
not let us out of his sight; he kept calling us back 
— once to be photographed, grouped with his six- 
foot " gargons " about the machine gun — to point 
out new moves in the battle, or confide some phase 
of his errant philosophy. 

A first requisite in being a notorious bandit, ap- 



WINTER FIGHT 295 

parently (Vienna papers please copy), is to speak 
the most exquisite French ; next, you must sincerely 
mourn the destruction by Austrians of Louis 
Quinze furniture and Fragonard tapestries in the 
various Austrian castles where chance quarters 
you. 

" The great existence," he would say. " One 
night you sleep on the floor of a peasant hovel, 
eating black bread. The next, you are between 
linen in a chateau, after a supper of champagne." 

I was showing him my map of Bukowina, and 
he was tracing his course through it, indicating the 
points at which he had blown up fourteen bridges 
in the retreat. 

" We camped once in the snow on that moun- 
tain-top, two thousand metres up," his finger 
paused on the sheet. " But without hardship, life 
would all be stale enough." 

And always his glasses were at his eyes, either 
fixed on the unwavering, comb-like line of his men 
on the shining fields along the river, or searching 
the abrupt hills on the Austrian side, in the blind- 
ing winter glare. 

" See them, see them! " he would cry, pressing 
the binoculars on us. " The Uhlans crossing that 
field — " and we could discern, pricked out in a 
black spidery train upon the snow, the enemy's 
horsemen slanting down into the valley; or upon 
the very road that we had followed yesterday, the 



296 FIVE FRONTS 

bobbing heads of infantry dipping into the hollow 
by the village of Ostritza. 

The whole action was, of course, to keep them 
from fording the Pruth. Should they force it, the 
artillery and infantry that had moved back toward 
Sadagura would be cut off. As for positions, the 
Austrians held the advantage. Their side of the 
river had good cover; they 'were firing from the 
houses of the Bukowina town of Mamornitza, ad- 
joining the Rumanian one from which we had 
crossed the frontier. The whole Russian force 
was utterly in the open of the flats. 

New infantry, continually marching from the 
east, supported it. Snake-like line after line 
passed through Boian below, across the camping- 
ground, and, reaching the flats, deployed into open 
formation, advancing in a long wavering line, 
firing, around an old hay-shed, and joining the im- 
mobile line of mounted men. Two companies 
stationed themselves along the road just under us, 
the men squatting in the snow on its right side 
some six feet from one another. Sight of them 
stirred no enthusiasm in our friend. 

" Reserves," he pointed scornfully. " Effi- 
ciency — zero." 

But always Shechin kept reverting in talk to his 
own men, to his scouts and outposts galloping like 
steeple-chasers across the dazzling scene of this 
winter action. Picked men, he told us, twenty 



WINTER FIGHT 297 

taken from this regiment, twenty from that, as he 
had requested the General of the Tenth Army. 
A side issue, the Bukowina campaign; few men 
could be spared, so the cavalry who bore the bur- 
den of it had to be the best. 

" They have been hard upon the Jews," he said. 
" But what else can you expect? They relieve 
them of their — er — lighter possessions when I 
am not around. But they are not brutes, ever. 
Killed none that I know of, and never bother with 
the women. I let them get their perquisites. If 
I didn't, we might not have any Cossacks, you 
see — " he winked. 

Certainly every one present in his body-guard 
had a pair of binoculars strung around the neck, 
and the moment before he had been complaining 
how the war had caught the whole Russian army 
short of them. And some of the glasses did look 
suspiciously fragile, as if they had been intended 
more for the foot-lights than for advancing 
Uhlans. 

" You know there is a bridge across the Pruth 
at Ostritza," I said, remembering what the tooth- 
less hack-driver in Czernowitz had told us. We 
were already deep-dyed informers. 

" Unfortunately, yes," he said. " And more 
unfortunately, the river is frozen enough for in- 
fantry to cross at many points. But let them, only 
let them ! " 



298 FIVE FRONTS 

He gave the handle of the machine-gun an 
eager, anticipatory twirl, and the muscles back of 
his jaw crept and puckered the bronze under his 
queer moustache. To us it was strangest that for 
all the racket of firing from the spread lines of in- 
fantry, from the Hussars, not a wisp of smoke 
showed against the glare of snow. 

" Any Germans, do you think," I asked, " across 
the river there? " 

" Germans ! " he exclaimed — Bukowina had 
been reported full of them. " In the three 
months that we have been here I have not seen 
one." 

And we drifted on to talk of the Turkestan 
troops. " We let them do nothing. We don't 
trust them. They are worthless beside white men, 
as are any aboriginal troops." 

From time to time the little yellow cart of the 
General Staff would mount the hill, and the black- 
bearded major who had first received us at head- 
quarters came to see how the fight was progress- 
ing. We chuckled as he, seeing how chummy we 
were with Shechin, instantly lost his frigid man- 
ner. The latter seemed to pick these moments to 
thrust us forward. 

" Look at those girls there," he seized me by 
the arm, pointing to two, better dressed than peas- 
ants, who were mounting the hill handbags in 
hand from the very ranks of infantry. " That is 



WINTER FIGHT 299 

the amazing thing of war. It is not the soldier 
who has no nerves, no fear, but the harmless crea- 
tures of an afflicted country, and particularly the 
women." 

It was now five o'clock, without change in the 
positions, or pause in the continual firing. Still, 
by studying the white southern hills, now bathed in 
a dazzling glamour under the sinking sun, you 
could discern the descending black threads of 
horsemen or infantry. Still, at intervals, some 
moving speck from the plain would mount toward 
us, and, becoming a furious horseman, scorning 
road and rise, dash up through the corn-stubble, 
salute, and thrust a message at his captain. And 
Shechin, reading it, would draw out his pad with 
carbon-paper between the leaves, scribble an an- 
swer, toss it to another waiting henchman, who 
flung upon his horse and galloped down the icy 
slope without touching a rein. 

Circus or no, it was more Buffalo Bill than war; 
no motor-scouts, no aeroplanes; the yellow wagon 
in place of a motor-car; instead of some lofty 
tactician with elegant entourage — our alert and 
garrulous friend, refined in the keenness of his 
mind, yet loving danger and action for their own 
sakes; loving his roving job and his loyal retainers. 

We built a fire on the floor of the unfinished 
mudhouse, against which leaned a rank of lances 
with their three-bladed points. Curtin and I in- 



300 FIVE FRONTS 

side began to feel ourselves part of the furry body- 
guard; they lent us cigarette "makes," pressed 
bread on us, winked behind Shechin's back in ban- 
tering endorsement of all his tiptoe eagerness. 
Terrible Cossacks of story, these? Oh, very well. 
Then as " terrible " are our own soldiers or ma- 
rines; for in warmth and friendliness, in quick re- 
sponse to our fellowship, they differed not the least 
from any enlisted men. 

Youngsters the world over, whether from the 
farms of Kansas or the plains of the Don, clad in 
sheepskins or contract khaki from Philadelphia, 
will be brothers in the free, stern leash of war. 
So when one, with a turn-up nose and a whole 
white astrakhan dogskin coiled on his crown, 
started a spat with his blue-eyed pal in a black 
ditto, there followed exactly the same playful 
rough-house — you could even guess what the 
spitting Russian cusses were — as if you were in 
a Texas barrack-room instead of on the firing-line 
in Bukowina. 

In the middle of it, Shechin bounded into the 
house, exclaiming: 

" Artillery! I must have artillery. I could in- 
flict severe losses upon those companies descending 
the hills." 

He squatted by the fire, scribbled his dispatch, 
and with a tactful, amused glance ended the scrap 
by entrusting it to him with the white shako, who 



WINTER FIGHT 301 

jumped on his horse and galloped away, like any 
stage courier. 

But no artillery appeared. Darkness, instead, 
made first intermittent, finally petered out the rum- 
pus all along the pallid Pruth. We helped fold 
up the machine-gun, and all descended into Boian, 
Curtin and I to hunt Max the artist, claim our 
lodging, and rustle supper. But the returning in- 
fantry, falling a-doze on the snow among their 
steaming wheeled kitchens, had brought officers 
who commandeered our bunks. Seeking others, 
we were again arrested: a sudden " Koodah- 
idite? " from a fellow with a gilt Greek cross on 
his cap, and it was always easier to mutter " Voen- 
nui stab," and point to headquarters than to test 
the man with Shechin's permit. This time, on the 
way there, we showed it to an old colonel of re- 
serves, who bowed almost reverently and freed 
us. But not wanting to bother the General Staff 
again, we climbed the hill behind their house and 
quartered ourselves with a pale Russian peasant 
woman, who cooked us eggs, and in the casual 
national way remained staring, with her little boy 
and girl, until we were ready to turn in upon one 
of the two beds. 

A youth of twenty, the little girl's uncle, slept 
with her in the other; but not until she, kneeling 
on the quilt and facing the east in the manner of 
her faith, repeated her prayers, crossing herself 



3 o2 FIVE FRONTS 

with a pudgy fist, and glancing always from us to 
the tiny window and all the racket of the army out- 
side. 

" To-night's the night," I said, " for the Aus- 
trians to cross the river, and work the Washing- 
ton-on-the-Delaware business. There's ice enough 
here, too." 

" Ye-es," drawled Curtin, likely remembering 
the number of shop signs in the name of " Perl- 
mutter " that you see all through Hungary. 
" Only it would go down in history as ' Perlmutter 
Crossing the Pruth! ' " 

Hour after hour in the night we listened to the 
heavy clank of artillery, now toiling eastward 
again, in retreat — a new phase. Were our 
friends evacuating Boian, leaving us to the mercy 
of the Austrians, whom we felt, as they would be, 
our enemies no less ? We kept jumping up to look 
through the window, standing by to follow the 
minute that headquarters emptied itself and took 
the road. And it was ominously lighted all night, 
the while Cossack messengers dashed in and out of 
the yard. 

But dawn, as I made the fire in the stove, found 
the staff still there, and promptly at seven o'clock 
the woodpecker sounds of rifle fire along the river 
broke out again. The pale woman, coming in to 
make us tea while the little girl and her heavy- 
faced uncle still snoozed, told us that seven of our 



WINTER FIGHT 303 

men — what else by now? — had been wounded 
in yesterday's action, and " hundreds of Aus- 
trians," of course, killed. 

" Then I guess no one will be crossing the 
river," said Curtin, as we rolled up our blanket to 
depart, and tried to press money on our hostess, 
which she refused to take. " We won't have to 
rescue the pictures in old Max's Louvre, eh, and 
bury them ? " 

Outside, the day was changed cold and grey, the 
firing occasional, but often in volleys as if from 
machine guns. Still pricked out in their long line 
through the red willows, stood Shechin's " admir- 
able " boys, never having budged all night; and 
that afternoon when despairing of any further 
fighting we hit for this town in Russia proper, they 
hung on there, rounding out a full twenty-four 
hours at their inexorable duty. 

We started to hunt up our bandit of the scarlet 
breeches. An orderly at the gate of the staff 
yard said that he was in the railway station. Just 
then an armoured train went kiting across the flats 
towards Sadagura. But at the station were noth- 
ing but infantry, who promptly arrested us again. 
Shechin's scribble again released, and we wandered 
up through alleys fenced with tight willow thatches 
to the high-road, there to wait interminably for a 
battle to develop, and watch the refugees. 

The yellow carts hitched outside tiny shacks 



3o 4 FIVE FRONTS 

showed, too, that the staff were edging towards the 
Russian border. Women with sheeted bundles on 
their heads, panting and groaning under the 
weight, streamed thither. One sledge, drawn by 
a man with a baby in his arms, held three babies 
less than four years old, and two little boys man- 
fully pushed the runners over the frozen ruts. 
There was no mother. But of the many women 
that passed thus, the few that were not barefoot, 
evicted by fear from their homes in this Russian 
midwinter, had their feet thrust stockingless into 
enormous, low-cut shoes. 

We warmed ourselves in one hovel at a white- 
washed mud stove. A Rumanian woman in a 
blue coral necklace was slicing potatoes, tossing 
them on it to broil — all there had been to eat for 
days — turn in turn for a freckled Russian boy, 
who gave me vile pipe tobacco, and two of her 
own youngsters. One of them not ten years old 
was smoking, too, and when I reproached him his 
mother shrugged her shoulders with a hopeless 
smile, in the manner of any parent powerless be- 
fore revolt in the rising generation. 

We gave up finding Shechin. No one seemed 
to know where he was or the artillery had gone. 
Outside in the road continued the endless march- 
ing and counter-marching of Cossacks, to-day in 
tight hoods with long muffler ends; of infantry, 
supply wagons. Priests, with yellow robes and 



WINTER FIGHT 305 

golden tassels; and regularly every half-hour a 
whole company of Turkomen pranced up the road 
looking for a fray, only to be ordered back toward 
Novo Sliatsa. 

These fellows, on horseback unlike the few we 
had seen, wore long gowns heavily wadded and 
of a deep carmine, curved swords in sheaths 
studded with silver nails, knives with finely 
inlaid handles. In some strange way it was om- 
inous, epochal, to watch them, aborigines from 
the wild Altai valleys, flat-faced, slit-eyed, with 
fierce black moustaches and skin more black than 
yellow, proudly passing in their gold and scarlet 
trappings the shivering, white-faced natives of the 
Occident; mounted Buddhas, flanked by mean 
stucco and thatch huts, under whose eaves, framed 
behind glass, gleamed so faintly ikons of our own 
Christian faith. 

One of the twelve-year-old mascots with the 
army held us up for our papers. We laughed at 
him, and never had I seen dark eyes flash so 
angrily, or a hand so grip a sabre, as he trudged 
up the road with his rifle, looking back and swear- 
ing at us over his little shoulder. 

We climbed a hill to a long dwelling with 
glassed-in verandas, where troops swarmed and 
cattle were being slaughtered, only to be arrested 
again and taken into a corncrib. Two artillery 
officers asleep on some hay, rubbed their eyes, 



3o6 FIVE FRONTS 

yawned, and grinned at Schechin's signature, 
promptly to fall asleep again. Our captors led us 
down the hill to a hut where one of the yellow 
carts was hitched, and where the subaltern with 
the blouse who knew us stood. He went in with 
the news of our fifth arrest, at least, and instantly 
there went up a roar of laughter from the whole 
staff in the house. 

Belaxev, our Lieutenant friend from Archangel, 
came out. The firing along the Pruth was relax- 
ing. There probably would be no more fighting 
for days, he said; and added, rather bitterly: 

" As it now appears, we never needed to have 
evacuated Czernowitz at all." 

Curtin and I grasped his hand, and started 
afoot for this town in Russia proper, just across 
the Bukowina border. The whole raiding Rus- 
sian force was strung for miles along the road, 
and, being headed away from its operations, we 
were no more arrested. Only, with our long 
coats, we undoubtedly were suspected of being 
Jews, for no less than three bearded patriots of 
Holy Russia stepped out of the ranks and de- 
manded our religious persuasion. 

u Angleski," we would answer. 

" Tak-tak — " (So) each beamed, rather awed 
but satisfied. " Angleski katoliki." Some day 
I am going to ask an Anglican bishop why it 
should make such a hit with a Russian moujik to 
claim the Church of England. 



WINTER FIGHT 307 

Every farmyard on both sides of the road was 
alive with singing, eating troops, their steaming 
kitchens, stacked arms. Dozens slept on the hay 
spilled from artillery caissons. Here and there 
lay a dead horse. Once I saluted a handsome 
captain riding with an orderly behind him on a 
huge dapple grey. 

" Who are you? " he asked in Russian, reining 
in with a stare. 

" We are Americans," I answered in French. 

" Ah," he beamed, noting my accent. " You 
speak English." 

He reached down and we shook hands, chatting 
in English. He offered us cigarettes. " From 
the way you saluted," he said apologetically, riding 
on, " I thought you were a German officer." And 
we all three laughed. 

We met a Red Cross orderly and a civilian 
climbing into a seedy barouche. The latter, a 
sharp-featured tradesman who had been in Amer- 
ica, was supplying the army with cooking-utensils, 
and we rode with them the remaining seven kilo- 
metres to this town. Its Bukowina (Austrian) 
half was wholly burned and deserted; bullet holes 
in what windows remained told how the Cossacks 
had cut loose on their first raid into the enemy's 
land. But perhaps from their treatment of us, 
because we had touched something of them be- 
neath their savage, traditional exterior, neither 
of us had it in our hearts to blame. 



308 FIVE FRONTS 

No gates blocked the road at the painted, bar- 
ber-pole boundary posts; not a soul stepped out 
of the Russian sentry-boxes, and we jogged into 
Bessarabia without showing a paper, maybe the 
first aliens ever to have entered thus the Czar's 
empire proper. But you cannot down the con- 
trast between the Russian and the Austrian halves 
of this place, whatever one's natural sympathies 
now at the close of our adventure. The latter 
was neat and clean, with graded streets, while 
here they are filthy seas of mud where black hogs 
root, and listless, long-coated Jews stand in front 
of tumble-down shacks dangling little canes. 

A meaning in this, surely, in view of the fu- 
ture. The Germanic race at least builds, dis- 
ciplines. No wonder, in the face of all the 
paradoxes you meet in this war, only a firmer neu- 
trality is the line of logic. 

Everywhere Turkomen floundered through the 
mud, afoot, mounted, in droshkies. The rooms 
of this loathsome inn are crowded with them. 
First thing, as his wife cooked us eggs, mine 
Hebrew host flung an English sovereign on the 
table, and wanted me to buy it. We dickered. 

Curtin owns it now, sold for 25 Austrian 
crowns, paid, too, in the damaged money hid 
from the Cossacks in my boots. It is worth 
nearly thirty. But, then, Curtin is a Yankee, as 
I said in the beginning. 



